Pioneer 9 of 21 · born 1930
Tu Youyou
Contribution. Led the research group that discovered artemisinin, the basis of today's front-line malaria treatments. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2015.
Factor coverage
Favorable entries (helped or barrier absent) and adverse entries (barrier or not overcome) by factor. Factor tags are this site's classification.
Barriers faced
| Factors | Statement |
|---|---|
| Biological Educational | Tuberculosis at age 16 interrupted her schooling for two years. |
| Educational Societal | She had no doctorate, no training abroad, and no membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which led Chinese media to call her a "three noes" scientist. |
| Societal Economic Biological | Her project began in 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, when most research had stalled and many experienced experts had been sidelined. With pharmaceutical workshops shut, her team extracted herbs in household vats, and several members, including Tu, developed health problems from solvent exposure. |
| Social | To focus on the work, she left her younger daughter with her parents. By her own account, the child did not recognize her three years later. |
| Societal | The work was part of a secret military project, and nothing from it was published until an anonymous 1977 paper on artemisinin's structure, with reports on its antimalarial effects following in 1979, so it was little known outside China for years. |
What helped
| Factors | Statement |
|---|---|
| Societal Economic | A national mission. Project 523, a secret program begun in 1967 to find new malaria treatments, involved over 500 scientists from about 60 military and civilian institutions. Its office coordinated collaboration and logistics, and her academy's leadership appointed her to head its research group. |
| Educational Cultural | Training in two traditions. Western-trained professors taught her pharmacy at Beijing Medical College. She then completed a government program in traditional Chinese medicine for scientists with modern medical training. |
| Cultural Psychological | A close reading of an ancient text. After more than 100 herbal extracts produced few promising results, she reread Ge Hong's A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, which describes soaking qinghao (sweet wormwood) in cold water rather than boiling it. She reasoned that heat was destroying the active ingredient and switched to low-temperature extraction with ether. In October 1971, sample number 191 fully suppressed malaria parasites in rodents. |
| Psychological | Personal risk. In July 1972, she and two colleagues took the extract themselves to speed up the safety evaluation. The first clinical trial that year treated 21 patients, and all recovered. |
| Social Technological | Collaboration. Other institutes helped determine artemisinin's chemical structure using X-ray crystallography. |
| Social | Outside advocates. In 2011, U.S. National Institutes of Health researchers Louis Miller and Xinzhuan Su reviewed previously confidential documents and concluded that the major credit belonged to Tu. She received the Lasker Award that year. |
Not overcome
Pattern summary
| Element | In this case |
|---|---|
| Door-opener | Academy leadership, National 523 Office |
| Knowledge source | Ge Hong's handbook, training in modern and traditional medicine |
| Institutional support | Project 523 |
| Built on recent work | Earlier Project 523 screening, traditional medical records |
| Setback overcome | Cultural Revolution disruption, no doctorate |
| Barrier not overcome | Credit disputes |
Sources
- NobelPrize.org: Tu Youyou, biographical (her own account, 2015)
- Miller, L. H., & Su, X. (2011). Artemisinin: discovery from the Chinese herbal garden. Cell. Cell00950-0)
- Lasker Foundation: Artemisinin therapy for malaria (2011)
- Science: Lasker Award rekindles debate over artemisinin's discovery (2011)
- Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings: The modest Nobel laureate, Youyou Tu
- Durrani, J. (2022, September). 50 years of artemisinin. Chemistry World
- Liu, L. (2016). Tu Youyou awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine. In G. Davies, J. Goldkorn, and L. Tomba (Eds.), Pollution: China Story Yearbook 2015. ANU Press. The China Story
Also relevant: Bell, A., Chetty, R., Jaravel, X., Petkova, N., & Van Reenen, J. (2019). Who becomes an inventor in America? Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(2), 647-713. All references