Member Since: 1/21/2008
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A fascinating read on the woman's life and work during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.
Quote:
It was 21 January 1969 when Mao Zedong gave a 39-year-old scientist from Zhejiang province the challenge of her life.
China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, with universities and schools across the country shutting their doors as the red guards ran riot.
Amid all the madness Youyou Tu, then a researcher at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, was handed a daunting mission: to find a drug that would cure malaria.
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Then, in 1969, everything changed when Tu was recruited to a medical research project so secret it was known only as “523”.
The unit had been created two years earlier – on 23 May 1967 – on the orders of Chairman Mao, who hoped to find a way of halting the spread of malaria, a disease that was decimating North Vietnamese troops fighting in the jungles to China’s south-west.
Tu was tasked with searching in nature for a new malaria treatment and was sent to Hainan, a tropical island off China’s southern coast that has long struggled with its blight.
There, in the sweltering rainforests of southern China, Tu witnessed up close the mosquito-borne disease’s devastating toll on the human body.
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But it was in ancient Chinese manuscripts that Tu found the key to beating the disease. Back in Beijing, Tu and her team scoured books about traditional Chinese medicine for leads on substances that might help them defeat malaria.
In a hundreds-of-years-old text, The Manual of Clinical Practice and Emergency Remedies by Ge Hong of the East Jin Dynasty, they found mention of sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) – or in Chinese qinghao – being used to treat malaria.
Tu’s team put it to the test. At first the results were mixed but after much persistence the researchers identified an active compound in the plant that attacked malaria-causing parasites in the blood and would later become known as artemisinin.
Not content with identifying the remedy, which thus far had only been tested on animals, Tu took it upon herself to test it. “As the head of this research group, I had the responsibility,” she said.
The treatment worked and was proved safe for humans. Along with insecticide-treated bed nets, artemisinin became a crucial tool in the fight against malaria in Africa and Asia. Experts credit the discovery with saving millions of lives.
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