Tu Youyou’s Ancient Malaria Breakthrough

Nobel laureate Tu Youyou discovered the malaria drug artemisinin in 1971 after studying a 1600-year-old Chinese medical text, "Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One's Sleeve," and realized that the sweet wormwood herb had to be extracted at low temperature rather than boiled. Using that cold extraction method, her team isolated artemisinin, a treatment estimated to have saved tens of millions of people from malaria. To prove its safety, Tu even tested the drug on herself before clinical trials, a bold step that eventually contributed to her 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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