Tu Youyou is a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist who revolutionized the fight against malaria with her discovery of artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin. These drugs are used to treat malaria and were a breakthrough in tropical medicine; they’ve saved millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.
Tu shared the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, becoming the first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first female citizen of the People's Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. She did so without a doctorate, a medical degree, or training abroad. Her education and research were carried out exclusively in China.
Tu was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China in 1930. She became interested in medical research after a bout of tuberculosis interrupted her high school education. She studied at the department of pharmaceutics of Beijing Medical College and then joined the Institute of Materia Medica at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (later the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences).
Tu participated in a full-time training course in the use of traditional Chinese medicine that was geared toward researchers with knowledge of Western medicine from 1959 to 1962. It would be this knowledge that she would apply later to modern drug discovery.
During the Vietnam War, President Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai for help in developing a malaria treatment for his soldiers. In 1969, Tu was appointed to lead Project 523. After witnessing the devastating toll malaria was taking on bodies, she had the idea to focus her studies on Chinese herbs. She was 39 at the time and kept her findings in a notebook, eventually amassing more than 2,000 traditional Chinese recipes and 380 herbal extracts.
One particular compound, sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), proved to be effective in inhibiting the malaria parasite. Tu volunteered to be the first human test subject and, after safe clinical trials, in 1981 presented her discovery to the World Health Organization.
Prior to her Nobel Prize win, in 2011 Tu became the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award in clinical medicine, also for her life-saving discoveries regarding artemisinin and malaria.