A 1,700-year-old recipe led her to artemisinin — and a Nobel Prize.
Tu Youyou (born 1930) is the Chinese pharmaceutical chemist who discovered artemisinin, the most effective malaria treatment in history: leading the secret Project 523 from 1969, she extracted the compound from sweet wormwood in 1972 and shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
With no advanced equipment and working through the Cultural Revolution, she turned to ancient Chinese medical texts for leads — and found, in a 4th-century handbook, the clue that unlocked a cure now saving millions of lives a year.
Tu Youyou was born on December 30, 1930, in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, and graduated in pharmacology from Peking University's medical school in 1955. She then trained in traditional Chinese medicine and joined the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing.
In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, North Vietnam asked China for help: malaria was killing more soldiers than bullets, and the parasite had grown resistant to chloroquine. Mao launched a covert drug-hunting effort, Project 523 — named for its start date, May 23, 1967. Tu, then 39, was put in charge of finding a cure.
Her team screened more than 2,000 traditional remedies and tested 380 extracts. The breakthrough came from Ge Hong's 4th-century 'Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments', which described soaking qinghao — sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua — in cold water to treat fevers.
Tu realized heat destroyed the active compound: earlier hot extractions had failed. Using low-temperature ether extraction, her team isolated artemisinin in 1972. To prove it safe, Tu volunteered to take the extract herself before any clinical trial — the first human test subject of the drug that would save millions.
Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) became the World Health Organization's standard malaria treatment, credited with saving millions of lives — yet Tu's role stayed little known outside China for decades. The 2011 Lasker Award began to change that.
In 2015 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with William Campbell and Satoshi Omura — the first Chinese citizen to win a science Nobel for work done in China. She was 84. The ancient text and the modern laboratory, she showed, were never enemies.
