TU YOUYOU

Tu Youyou turned to Chinese medical texts from the Zhou, Qing, and Han Dynasties to find a traditional cure for malaria, ultimately extracting a compound – artemisinin – that has saved millions of lives. When she isolated the ingredient she believed would work, she volunteered to be the first human subject. She is the first mainland Chinese scientist to have received a Nobel Prize in a scientific category, and she did so without a doctorate, a medical degree, or training abroad.

Tu Youyou's research report, 1971-1978. Tu Youyou was born in 1930 in the city of Ningbo on the east coast of China. Her family stressed education for her and her four brothers, but she had to take a two-year break from studying at 16 because she had contracted tuberculosis. When she returned to school, she knew exactly what she wanted to study: medicine. She wanted to find cures for diseases like the one that had afflicted her.

Tu Youyou with one of her mentors, pharmacologist Lou Zhicen, in the 1950s. Lou Zhicen trained her to identify medicinal plants based on their botanical descriptions. Photo: Public domain At Beijing Medical College, Tu studied pharmacology, learning how to classify medicinal plants, extract active ingredients and determine their chemical structures. When she graduated in 1955 at the age of 24, Tu was assigned to work at the newly established Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where she would stay for her entire career. From 1959 to 1962, she took a full-time course in traditional Chinese medicine for researchers trained in modern Western methods.