Tu Youyou: A Woman Scientist with a Vision for Traditional Chinese Medicine

Tu Youyou (屠呦呦) is a pharmaceutical chemist and malariologist from China. She managed to extract artemisinin, a drug vital in treating malaria in the 20th century. She was inspired by an ancient chinese medicine recipe for treating malaria and became the first person to properly extract the substance. Her ground-breaking work has saved millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, allowing her to win multiple awards, with the Nobel Prize amongst them. Thus, she became the first woman in the history of China to receive a Nobel Prize and the first person in China to receive the Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine.

Tu Youyou was born December 30th 1930 in the city of Ningbo on the East Coast of China. She was raised in an intellectual family, but had to take a study break during her highschool because of tuberculosis. This incident gave her the determination to study and find cures for diseases like the one she suffered. She later enrolled in Beijing Medical College where she studied pharmacology and  learned about medicinal plants. Upon graduation, Tu Youyou worked at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine for the rest of her career. She later focused on studying traditional Chinese medicine using western research methods. 

At the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tu Youyou led a team of scientists in search of the malaria treatment. Her team later reviewed an ancient Chinese text dating back to the Jin Dynasty which described sweet wormwood as effective in treating intermittent fevers – a tell tale sign for malaria. Tu Youyou and her team experimented with the ancient cure and eventually successfully extracted artemisinin from the sweet wormwood, which was developed into the main compound in making anti-malaria drugs in 1971. 

Her work was mostly used in North Vietnam during the Vietnam war to treat soldiers infected with chloroquine-resistant malaria. It took about 2 decades until the World Health Organization approved for the drug to be used internationally and helped save millions of lives.

“It is my dream that Chinese medicine will help us conquer life-threatening diseases worldwide and that people across the globe will enjoy its benefits for health promotion,” Tu Youyou said. Her dream has come true.