JINHA

NEWS CENTER -The first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria. The 84-year-old Tu Youyou honoured the Nobel Prize her research on ancient Chinese texts.

Tu Youyou attended a pharmacology school in Beijing. After her education in pharmacology school, she became a researcher at the Academy of Chinese Traditional Medicine.

The people in China call her the "three noes" because she hasn't medical degree, doctorate and she's never worked overseas.

She started to work on Malaria and she was recruited to a top-secret government unit known as "Mission 523"

In 1967's, the malaria spread by mosquitoes was decimating Chinese soldiers fighting Americans in the jungles of northern Vietnam. So the Communist leader Mao Zedong decided there was an urgent national need to find a cure for malaria. A secret research unit was formed to find a cure for the illness. Tu Youyou was instructed to become the new head of Mission 523 two years later. She was dispatched to the southern Chinese island of Hainan to study how malaria threatened human health. She left her four-year-old daughter at a local nursery and she stayed there for 6 months. And also her husband was sent to work at the countryside during the China's Cultural Revolution.

Tu Youyou's search was inspired by ancient Chinese texts

Mission 523 studied on ancient books to find historical methods of fighting malaria. More than 240,000 compounds around the world had already been tested, without any success when Tu started her search for an anti-malarial drug. Finally the team found a clue 'sweet wormwood' which used to treat malaria in China around 400 AD. The team isolated one active compound in wormwood (artemsinin) which battle malaria-friendly parasites. Then the team tested extracts of the compound but nothing was effective in eradicating the drug. So Tu Youyou decided to look the original ancient text again. After another careful reading, she found out the drug recipe 'the heating the extract without allowing it to reach boiling point'.

Tu Youyou volunteered to tested her medicine to ensure it was safe

The drug showed promising results in mice and monkeys. Tu Youyou volunteered to tested her medicine to ensure it was safe. She made a statement to Chinese media ""As the head of the research group, I had the responsibility,". After the positive result, the clinical trials began using Chinese labourers.

Tu Youyou combined the ancient Chinese texts with the modern medicine so she won the Nobel Prize for medicine.

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