THE WOMAN WHOSE DISCOVERY HAS SAVED MILLIONS

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TU YOUYOU

In 1969, China was secretly searching for a malaria cure to help its ally, North Vietnam, whose soldiers were dying from drug-resistant malaria in the jungle as much as from combat. The Chinese government had launched a covert operation called Project 523, named for the date, May 23, 1967 when the planning meeting was held in Beijing.

Tu Youyou, a 39-year-old researcher trained in both Western pharmacology and traditional Chinese medicine, was put in charge of a team hunting for the answer, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when most scientific work had ground to a halt.

She turned to Chinese medical texts from the Zhou, Qing, and Han Dynasties looking for a traditional cure for malaria, eventually finding a clue in a centuries-old emergency-prescription handbook. Initial extracts from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) failed, until she realized the ancient texts implied a "cold" extraction process, since heat was destroying the active compound.

In 1972, they isolated the active compound itself and named it qinghaosu, later known as artemisinin. Tu insisted on trying the drug on herself first to confirm its safety, before going on to test it on 21 patients in Hainan, all of whom recovered.

Tu went uncredited for years. It took two more decades before the World Health Organization recommended artemisinin-based therapy as the first line of defense against malaria. IBSA Foundation, and the Lasker Foundation later called it "arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century."

In 2015, at age 84, she became the first citizen of the People's Republic of China to win a Nobel Prize, given for her key contributions to the discovery, though the prize going to a single person out of the many researchers on the secret Project 523 was not without controversy.

Artemisinin-based combination therapies are now the WHO-recommended first-line treatment for uncomplicated malaria, and her work has undoubtedly saved millions of lives around the world.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.