Tu Youyou (1930-…), a Chinese pharmacologist, won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for developing a highly effective drug to treat malaria. Pharmacology is the scientific study of the effect of chemicals on living things, often how drugs work in the body. Malaria is one of the most widespread and threatening parasitic diseases in human beings. Tu shared the prize with the Irish-born scientist William C. Campbell and the Japanese scientist Satoshi Omura.
Tu was born Dec. 30, 1930, in Ningbo, in the Zhejiang province of eastern China. In 1951, she moved to the capitol Beijing (also spelled Peking) and studied pharmacology at Peking University. She graduated in 1955 and began work at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, now called the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, in Beijing.
In 1969, during the Cultural Revolution in China, when many schools, universities, and research centers were closed, Tu was assigned to a secret research project. The project, known simply as “523,” was to find a treatment for malaria, which was killing many Vietnamese and American soldiers in neighboring Vietnam. Tu studied ancient texts on traditional Chinese medicine in search of herbal remedies that could be tested for effectiveness against malaria. One book, the Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, was written some time in the 300’s A.D. by a healer named Ge Hong. The text describes qinghao, a medicinal plant known elsewhere as sweet wormwood or Artemisia annua, as being useful for treating fevers. Tu and her colleagues eventually identified a compound in this plant that was effective in treating malaria. This compound was developed into the drug artemisinin. The drug has helped treat malaria and prevent death from the disease in millions of people throughout the world.
