Tu Youyou Found Malaria Breakthrough

In the 1970s, Chinese pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin while searching for a new malaria treatment. She drew on traditional Chinese medical texts, then tested extracts from sweet wormwood until her team found a compound that worked against malaria parasites. The discovery became a major breakthrough in 20th-century tropical medicine and helped save millions of lives. In 2015, Tu won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, despite later being described as someone "almost completely forgotten by people" before that recognition.

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