Personality Quiz

BE YOU CELEBRATES Tu Youyou

As part of the Be You Race and Ethnicity Group, we hope to share some key figures who have been influentional in their field of work. In this issue, I will be presenting Tu Youyou. She is the Chinese pharmaceutical chemist who discovered a cure for malaria.

Malaria is a serious and sometimes fatal disease caused by a parasite that infect mosquitos. These then act as a vector transmitting their disease to humans through bites. People who get malaria are usually sick with high fevers and flu-like illness. In 2020, there were an estimated 241 million cases of malaria worldwide with deaths at 627,000. The African region carries a disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden and is home to 95% of malaria cases and 96% of deaths in 2020 with children under five years old, accounting for an estimated 80% of all malaria deaths in the region. Tu Youyou was born and raised in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China. Since 1965, she worked at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine used sweet wormwood to treat fever. After studies of traditional herbal medicines, Youyou Tu managed to extract a substance which inhibits the malaria parasite. Drugs based on this finding have led to survival and improved health for millions of people. The compound that she extracted is called artemisinin.

North Vietnam asked China for help with battling malaria after tremendous casualties among its soldiers in the Vietnam War. Mao Zedong launched Project 523 on 23 May 1967 to find a cure for chloroquine-resistant malaria. (Cholorquine had been the previous treatment). She is the first mainland Chinese scientist to have received a Nobel Prize in a scientific category and she did this without a medical degree. She was awarded her prize in 2015. It took two decades for the World Health Organisation to recommend artemisinin as the first line of defense against malaria. The Lasker Foundation called the discovery “arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century”. The reason the discovery of this drug has been so highly praised is because it has been recognised as a significant milestone in the human journey towards conquering malaria.

Arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century

Mao’s politically radical Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution during the mid-20th Century limited scientific discoveries as resources were focused in military applications as well as achieving the superpower industrial nation that Mao desired. Soviet influence also meant that Chinese science was based on bureaucratic rather than professional principles. This meant that information was controlled and therefore this led to Tu Youyou’s research being a product of Mao’s own policies, suggesting that perhaps the discovery could have been made sooner had there not been so many limitations. She was influential to science and this is why she is such an important figure who should be recognised for her significant role in creating a cure for one of the deadliest diseases in the world.