Tu Youyou

Professor (not Dr. – she did this without a doctorate) Tu Youyou and her group re-discovered artemisinin, a drug type that revolutionized anti-malarial treatment, totally in secret. Mao's "cultural revolution" effectively halted scientific progress, as bourgeoisie-western trained scientists were seen as anticommunist, but this turned out to be counter-productive when their ally, North Korea, needed a way to minimize malarial deaths in the army. So, Mao asked hundreds of scientists, including Prof. Tu Youyou, to secretly work on the "523 project," tasked with finding another anti-malarial drug. 

Professor Tu discovered the drug after pouring over 6000 Chinese herb recipes for treating fever. They found the Artemisia annua plant appeared frequently and had antimalarial properties, but due to differences in harvesting the plant (seasonal variation, leaves vs stem, etc) the effectiveness varied. So, Professor Tu also used historical clues to guide her purification and extraction strategy, and came up with a process that yielded 95% efficacy in the first clinical trial of artemisinin (which she conducted). She won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for the countless lives she saved and for sparking the transition from chloroquine to artemisinin in anti-malarial care.


-Sophia