Tu Youyou's Cold Artemisinin Extraction

Tu Youyou's discovery of the malaria drug artemisinin drew on a roughly 1,600-year-old Chinese medical text. Its instructions for preparing sweet wormwood led her to suspect that boiling damaged the active ingredient, so she tried a low-temperature extraction. After successful animal tests, Tu and two colleagues tested the extract on themselves before giving it to patients. She received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.

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