By Dina Conner
11 December 2015
Tu Youyou has become the first female scientist of the People’s Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize, awarded for her contribution to the fight against malaria, one of the deadliest diseases in human history. Thanks to her discovery of qinghaosu, malaria patients all over the world now have had a greatly increased chance of survival.
Born in 1930, in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, Tu studied medicine at university in Beijing between 1951 and 1955. After graduation, she worked at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. She completed further training courses in traditional Chinese medicine, acquiring a broad knowledge of both traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine.
Tu’s education was soon to prove very useful. In the 1960s, many people were dying of malaria, and in 1969 Tu became head of a team that intended to find a cure for the disease. She collected over 2,000 traditional Chinese medical recipes for malaria treatment and made hundreds of extracts from different herbs. When they failed to produce any promising results, Tu referred to the ancient books of traditional Chinese medicine again. Inspired by an over 1,600 – year – old text about preparing qinghao extract with cold water, Tu redesigned the experiments and tried extracting the herb at a low temperature in order not to damage its effective part. On 4 October 1971, after 190 failures, she succeeded in making qinghao extract that could treat malaria in mice.
However, it was hard to produce enough qinghao extract for large trials because research resources were limited. Tu and her team managed to find solutions to the problem. When there was no research equipment, they had to extract herbs using household water containers. They worked day and night and their health began to suffer because of the poor conditions, but they never gave up.
Even with large amounts of qinghao extract produced, however, they still faced another problem. The trials on patients were likely to be postponed because they did not have sufficient safety data. To speed up the process and ensure its safety, Tu and her team volunteered to test qinghao extract on themselves first.
The efforts of Tu and her team finally paid off. In November 1972, through trial and error, they successfully discovered qinghaosu—the most effective part of the qinghao extract. As a key part of many malaria medicines, qinghaosu has since benefited about 200 million malaria patients. More than 40 years after its discovery, Tu was eventually awarded a Nobel Prize for her work. In her Nobel Lecture, she encouraged scientists to further explore the treasure house of traditional Chinese medicine and raise it to a higher level. Perhaps the next generation of scientists, drawing on the wisdom of traditional Chinese medicine, will indeed discover more medicines beneficial to global health care.