Tu Youyou

Also known as Youyou Tu

Tu Youyou was born in 1930 and worked at the Institute of Chinese Materia Medica of the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (now the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences). In 1967 a nationwide project to find new antimalarial drugs, code-named 523, began; in January 1969 the Academy gave its task of studying antimalarial herbal drugs to the Institute, and she became head of its antimalarial research group. In 1971, prompted by a passage in the Eastern Jin physician Ge Hong's Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, it turned to low-temperature extraction of sweet wormwood with ether, and on 4 October of that year the ether neutral extract numbered 191 inhibited the malaria parasite by 100 per cent. In 1972 the group ran a clinical check at Changjiang on Hainan, and in November that year it separated an antimalarial crystal on a silica gel column, later named artemisinin. In October 1986 artemisinin and its suppositories received a new-drug certificate. On 5 October 2015 the Nobel Assembly announced that one half of that year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to her "for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria".