Tu Youyou

Tu Youyou was born on December 30, 1930, in Ningbo, a port city in Zhejiang Province on China's eastern coast ^[1]. She was the only daughter among five children, and her given name, Youyou, was drawn by her father from a line in the Book of Odes, an ancient collection of Chinese poetry that describes the call of deer feeding on wild artemisia. The coincidence between her name and the plant that later defined her career has often been noted by biographers ^[2].

At sixteen she contracted tuberculosis and was forced to interrupt her schooling for two years. The long illness, she later explained in interviews and in her Nobel lecture, shaped her decision to study medicine: she wanted to be able to cure diseases like the one that had nearly derailed her own youth ^[3]. After recovering, she returned to school in Ningbo and completed her secondary education.

In 1951 she entered Peking University, enrolling in the Department of Pharmacology at its medical school, where she studied pharmacognosy, the science of drugs derived from natural sources. She graduated in 1955 and was assigned to the Institute of Materia Medica at the newly established Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, the institution where she would spend her entire working life ^[1]. In the late 1950s she also completed a two and a half year training course in traditional Chinese medicine designed for researchers with a background in Western pharmacology, an unusual dual education that later proved decisive ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Tu Youyou before 1969 would have found a mid-level researcher studying Chinese herbal remedies, including work on Lobelia chinensis, a plant used against schistosomiasis. Her career changed abruptly that year when she was appointed head of a research group within Project 523, a secret military program launched by the Chinese government on May 23, 1967 ^[3]. The program's purpose was urgent: chloroquine-resistant malaria was killing soldiers in the jungles of North Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh had asked Beijing for help. Malaria was also a serious problem in southern China itself ^[4].

The timing was extraordinary. The Cultural Revolution had shut down most Chinese scientific institutions, and many senior scientists had been denounced or sent to the countryside. Tu, then 39 years old and without a doctorate, was one of the few qualified researchers available. Accepting the assignment carried a personal cost: her husband, the metallurgical engineer Li Tingzhao, had been sent to a labor camp, and she placed her elder daughter in a nursery and left her younger daughter with her parents in Ningbo so that she could travel and work full time on the project ^[3].

Her first task took her to Hainan Island in southern China, where she observed malaria patients firsthand. Back in Beijing, her team combed through classical Chinese medical texts, folk recipes, and interviews with practitioners, eventually compiling a list of roughly 2,000 candidate remedies. From these they prepared hundreds of herbal extracts and screened them against malaria parasites in rodents ^[2].

Among Tu Youyou achievements, the central one is the isolation of artemisinin, known in Chinese as qinghaosu, from the plant Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood. An extract of the plant showed early promise in her screens but gave inconsistent results. The breakthrough came when Tu revisited a 4th-century text by the physician Ge Hong, the Zhouhou Beiji Fang (A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies), which advised soaking qinghao in cold water and drinking the wrung-out juice for intermittent fevers ^[4]. She reasoned that heat used in conventional extraction was destroying the active ingredient and redesigned the process using ether at low temperature.

In October 1971, extract number 191 from her modified procedure proved 100 percent effective at clearing malaria parasites from the blood of infected mice and monkeys ^[3]. Before human trials could begin, and amid the chaos of the era, Tu and two colleagues volunteered to take the extract themselves to test its safety. Clinical trials in patients on Hainan Island in 1972 confirmed that the compound cleared fevers and parasites rapidly. That same year her team isolated the pure crystalline compound, and by 1973 Tu had synthesized a derivative, dihydroartemisinin, that proved even more potent and became the basis of later drugs ^[2].

Because the work was classified, results appeared only in anonymous Chinese publications during the 1970s, and international recognition came slowly. The first English-language reports in 1979 and a 1981 World Health Organization meeting in Beijing brought artemisinin to global attention ^[4]. Today artemisinin-based combination therapies, or ACTs, are the standard first-line treatment for Plasmodium falciparum malaria recommended by the WHO, and they are credited with sharply reducing malaria deaths worldwide since the early 2000s ^[5].

Recognition arrived in her ninth decade. In 2011 Tu received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, often a precursor to the Nobel, for the discovery of artemisinin ^[6]. On October 5, 2015, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing the prize year with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura, who were honored for a different antiparasitic discovery ^[1]. She was the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize in any category and the first Nobel laureate in the sciences to have done all of her prizewinning research within the People's Republic of China.

Tu married Li Tingzhao, a former classmate from her Ningbo school days who became an engineer in the metallurgical industry. The couple had two daughters ^[3]. The separations imposed by Project 523 and the Cultural Revolution were long: Tu later recalled that when she returned from an extended assignment, her younger daughter did not recognize her ^[2].

Colleagues and journalists have described her as direct and unconcerned with status. Chinese media nicknamed her the 'three noes' scientist: no doctorate, no study abroad, and no membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering, despite repeated nominations ^[4]. She has said plainly that the honors matter less than the fact that the medicine works.

One notable Tu Youyou fact concerns credit. Project 523 involved hundreds of researchers across many institutions, and after the Lasker Award some Chinese scientists argued the discovery was collective. The Lasker Foundation and the Nobel committee both concluded that Tu made the three decisive contributions: bringing Artemisia annua into the program, devising the low-temperature extraction that yielded an active compound, and conducting the first human tests ^[6].

Tu remained at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (the renamed Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine) throughout her career, becoming a tenured researcher in 1980 and chief scientist of the academy in the 2000s ^[1]. Well into her eighties she continued to direct research on artemisinin, including studies on emerging artemisinin resistance in Southeast Asia and on possible new uses for the compound, such as treatment of lupus, work her team announced in 2019 ^[5].

Honors continued to accumulate after the Nobel. In 2016 she received China's Highest Science and Technology Award, the country's top scientific honor, and in 2019 she was awarded the Medal of the Republic, the highest civilian decoration of the People's Republic of China ^[5]. In the same year the BBC included her in a public poll of the most important figures of the 20th century, alongside Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Alan Turing ^[7].

She donated much of her Nobel prize money to research funds at Peking University and her home institute. Now in her nineties, she lives in Beijing and rarely appears in public, though her institute continues the malaria research program she built ^[2].

Any Tu Youyou biography ends with numbers that are hard to match in modern medicine. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria mortality fell by roughly half between 2000 and 2015, a period in which artemisinin combination therapies became the global standard of care, and public health researchers credit the drug with saving millions of lives, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa ^[5].

Her method has become a case study in drug discovery. Rather than treating traditional medicine as folklore or as unquestionable wisdom, she mined classical texts for leads and then subjected them to rigorous chemistry and controlled testing. The Nobel committee emphasized this point in 2015, noting that her work showed how the world's heritage of herbal medicine could yield modern drugs when combined with scientific method ^[1]. In China the prize prompted new investment in pharmacological research on traditional remedies.

She also changed what a scientific career could look like in China. A woman without a doctorate or foreign training, working through political upheaval in an underfunded institute, produced one of the most consequential discoveries of the 20th century. Asteroid 31230 Tuyouyou is named for her, and her story is now taught in Chinese schools as an example of persistence in research ^[4]. Artemisinin resistance remains a live threat, and the scientific effort to protect the drug's effectiveness, which she joined personally in her final working years, is part of her continuing legacy ^[5].