Beijing, Oct 6 (EFE).Beijing, Oct 6 (EFE). — China’s Tu Youyou, who won the Nobel prize for medicine this year for discovering a new treatment against malaria, shared the award with her team and called it an “an honor for China’s science cause and traditional Chinese medicine in their course of reaching out to the world.”
On Monday, Tu became the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel and the first Chinese to win in the category of medicine.
The win also marked a milestone as the research was based on traditional Chinese medicine, a discipline that is not always recognized in the West due to its empirical base.
The 84yearold scientist discovered Artemisinin, a drug that has been used for treating malaria to save millions of lives in the world, in 1969.
“Artemisinin is a gift for the world people from the traditional Chinese medicine,” said the Beijingbased doctor Monday afternoon when government officials paid her congratulatory visits, according to official news agency Xinhua.
Tu said the discovery of such treatment is a successful example of collective research on traditional Chinese medicine, sharing the credit with fellow scientists after she was criticized for ‘appropriating’ the achievement.
Tu’s discovery dates back to her research in the 60s and 70s, during the Cultural Revolution, when scientists were considered counterrevolutionary and were not allowed to continue with their research.
However, the dictator Mao Zedong allowed Tu to continue finding a treatment against malaria and helped finance her work, due to the high number of deaths that the disease was causing south of the country.
Tu also expressed her gratitude to a 1,300yearold book found in the southern Chinese island of Hainan.
Based on Chinese traditional medicine, focusing on trial and error and experiences that have been saved in books throughout history, the ancient manuscript stressed Chinese wormwood (Artemisia annua) was considered by locals a good remedy against fevers, a symptom of malaria.
Yu, just 39 years old then, managed to isolate the active agent in the plant, artemisinin.
The “inspiration from traditional Chinese medicine” was important, said the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, Juleen. R. Zierath, in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.
“But what was really critical was that Tu Youyou identified the active agent in that plant extract, there was a lot of modern chemistry, biochemistry attached to this to bring forward this new drug,” added Zierath.
