Nobel Prize victor Tu Youyou

The news of Chinese scientist Tu Youyou winning the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine drew much interest in Italy, especially for the role traditional Chinese medicine played in helping her find a cure for malaria. When tested, it was found to reduce the number of malaria parasites in the blood.

“All honor goes to the team, and such is China”, said Tu. In 2013, 392 million treatment courses using the drug were procured by countries where the disease in endemic.

“We know artemisinin can prevent and cure malaria and nearly all Chinese companies operating in Angola had artemisinin drugs”, said Zhao Hongbin, secretary general of the Chinese chamber of commerce in Angola. In the course of her research, Dr Tu began examining the properties of wormwood after reading a 4th Century Chinese text titled, “Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One’s Sleeve”. She shares the prize with Irish-born William Campbell and Japan’s Satoshi Omura, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute announced Monday.

The unusual circumstances aside, the isolation of the anti-malarial substance, artemisinin, like most scientific discoveries, resulted from a huge amount of trial and error, Tu recalled in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday. “When you are entrusted with an assignment, you do your best”, said Tu, whose husband was then serving time in a re-education labor camp for intellectuals.

Speaking to the state news agency, Liu Qingquan, the president of the Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, praised the value of local wisdom and traditional medicine.

Describing the prize as a great honor, she was quick to give credit to her research team. He said there is now insufficient incorporation of traditional methods in medical science, and vice versa. China’s prestigious academic institutions are known to be extremely hierarchical and success in these organizations is more commonly a result of relationships, seniority and political connections than scientific achievements. “If such characteristics cannot fully account for her being rejected by CAS, they can at least say something about her integrity as a scientist”.

Malaria was easy to cure with early diagnosis and the help of Artemisinin, Zhang said, adding the high mortality rates occurred in Angola mostly among pregnant women or children under the age of five from impoverished families in remote areas of the country.