Tu Youyou is a Chinese scientist who discovered artemisinin, a drug that has significantly reduced death rates from Malaria. She was awarded with the 2011 Lasker Award in Clinical Medicine and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine, alongside William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura.
Tu was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China on December 30, 1930. A tuberculosis outbreak interrupted her high school education but sparked her interest in medical research. She attended the Beijing Medical University School of Pharmacy from 1951 to 1955. After graduating in 1955, she continued her research on Chinese herbal medicine in the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. During her early years in research, Tu studied Lobelia chinensis, a traditional Chinese medicine to treat schistosomiasis which is an infection of the urinary tract or intestines caused by trematodes and was widespread in the first half of the 20th century in South China. In 1967, during the Vietnam War, a secret drug discovery project named Project 523 was set up for the development of a treatment for malaria. Tu was appointed head of the Project 523 research group in early 1969. At this point, scientists worldwide had screened over 240, 000 compounds to treat malaria without success. Tu had an idea of screening Chinese herbs and by 1971, her team had screened over 2, 000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal extracts which were tested on mice. In 1972, they were able to extract a pure compound, later named qinghaosu (青蒿素) or artemisinin, from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), which was completely effective in animal tests. As head of the research group, Tu felt she had the responsibility and volunteered to be the first human subject for the drug. She and her group studied the chemical structure and pharmacology of artemisinin. Tu’s work on malaria earned her the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Tu is jokingly referred to as the “Three-Without Scientist” because she is a scientist without a doctor degree (there was no postgraduate education in China then), without studying abroad, and without membership of Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is now regarded as a representative figure of the first generation of Chinese medical workers since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Resources: https://health.sohu.com/20090929/n267089753.shtml http://en.people.cn/n/2015/1006/c90000-8958353.htm Karen Eusebio Masters student
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AuthorWe are graduate students at the Department of Microbiology, University of Manitoba Archives
October 2023
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