Education and Training
Tu Youyou studied pharmacology — the science of medicines and drugs — at Beijing Medical University, graduating in 1955. After college, she spent two and a half years in special training classes where she learned about both modern Western medicine and traditional Chinese herbal medicine. This unusual combination of training would later prove crucial to her greatest discovery. She then began working at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, where she spent her entire career. Although she never earned a PhD, never studied abroad, and did not hold a medical degree, her deep knowledge of both ancient and modern medicine made her uniquely qualified for the challenge ahead.
Project 523
In 1969, during the Vietnam War, the Chinese government secretly asked Tu Youyou to lead a special research project called Project 523. Malaria, a deadly disease spread by mosquitoes, was killing huge numbers of North Vietnamese soldiers and Chinese workers in tropical areas. Thousands of antimalarial compounds had already been tested by scientists around the world, and none of them worked well enough. Tu Youyou, then 39 years old, was chosen to lead a team of researchers to find a new cure. The project was so secret that she could not even tell her husband what she was working on, and she had to send her young daughters to live with relatives.
The Ancient Clue
Tu Youyou and her team took an approach that no other researchers had tried — they turned to ancient Chinese medicine texts for clues. She and her colleagues reviewed more than 2,000 traditional herbal remedies recorded over centuries of Chinese medical practice. After testing hundreds of herbal extracts with no success, she found a promising clue in a 1,600-year-old medical text written by a physician named Ge Hong. The text described using sweet wormwood, a common plant known in Chinese as qinghao, to treat fevers. But the ancient recipe said to soak the plant in cold water and wring out the juice, which was very different from the boiling method Tu Youyou’s team had been using.
The Breakthrough
Tu Youyou realized that the high temperatures used in their extraction process might be destroying the plant’s healing properties. She redesigned the experiment to extract the active compound, later named artemisinin, at low temperatures using ether as a solvent. When she tested the low-temperature extract, it killed 100 percent of the malaria parasites in the laboratory. To make sure the medicine was safe for humans, Tu Youyou bravely volunteered herself as the first human test subject, taking the extract before it was given to any patients. The treatment worked beautifully in clinical trials, curing malaria patients who had not responded to any other drugs.
Saving Millions of Lives
Artemisinin-based treatments have become the most important weapon in the global fight against malaria. The World Health Organization now calls artemisinin-based combination therapies essential medicine and recommends them as the first-line treatment for malaria worldwide. Since these treatments became widely available, malaria deaths in Africa have dropped by more than 20 percent, saving millions of lives, especially among young children. Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, mostly in tropical regions of Africa, but the death toll would be far higher without Tu Youyou’s discovery. Her work turned a humble plant that had been used in Chinese folk medicine for centuries into one of the most important drugs in modern history.
The Nobel Prize
In 2015, Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of artemisinin. She was the first Chinese scientist to win a Nobel Prize in any science category for work conducted entirely in China. The award was especially surprising because Tu Youyou is sometimes called the “three noes” scientist — she has no medical degree, no PhD, and no experience studying or working abroad. Her Nobel Prize showed the world that groundbreaking science can come from unexpected places and that traditional knowledge, when combined with modern scientific methods, can lead to life-saving results. She donated part of her Nobel Prize money to support young scientists in China.
Legacy and Impact
Tu Youyou’s story is one of persistence, creativity, and courage in the face of enormous obstacles. She worked in secrecy for years, was separated from her family, and received little recognition for decades after her discovery. Even today, she remains a quiet and private person who rarely gives interviews or public speeches. Her work showed that looking to the past can help solve modern problems. Tu Youyou continues to research artemisinin and its potential uses against other diseases, including lupus and certain cancers. She is celebrated in China and around the world as one of the most important medical scientists of the twentieth century.
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