Born in a small provincial city near Shanghai in 1930, Tu Youyou is the unlikely heroine responsible for saving millions of lives from her discoveries about malaria.
Her amazing story began during the Vietnam War. Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, asked the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai for help developing a treatment for malaria. North Vietnam had an acute problem: their soldiers were dying from a drug-resistant form of malaria. Malaria was also a major cause of death throughout China. Zhou Enlai convinced Mao Zedong to fund a secret drug discovery project in 1967, code named Project 523.
Tu was appointed the head of the project in early 1969. Her team screened over 2,000 traditional Chinese medicines and found one particularly effective compound that led to the discovery of artemisinin - still the best drug to fight the mosquito-borne disease.
While she was doing her original research, China was a dangerous and treacherous place gripped by the Cultural Revolution. Millions were persecuted and killed, especially scientists and intellectuals. Tu’s husband was banished to the countryside while her daughter was sent to a nursery in Beijing.
In 2015, Tu was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine.
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