Tu Youyou (b. December 30, 1930, Ningbo, Zhejiang, China) was a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist and malariologist. She discovered artemisinin (also known as qinghaosu) and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa.
For her work, Tu received the 2011 Lasker Award in clinical medicine and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura. Tu was the first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first female citizen of the People's Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. She was also the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award. Tu was born, educated and carried out her research exclusively in China.
Tu was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China, on December 30, 1930. She attended Xiaoshi Middle School for junior high school and the first year of high school, before transferring to Ningbo Middle School in 1948. A tuberculosis infection interrupted her high school education but inspired her to go into medical research. From 1951 to 1955, she attended Peking University Medical School / Beijing Medical College. In 1955, Tu graduated from Beijing Medical University School of Pharmacy and continued her research on Chinese herbal medicine in the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. Tu studied at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and graduated in 1955. Later Tu was trained for two and a half years in traditional Chinese medicine.
After graduation, Tu worked at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (now the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medical Sciences) in Beijing.
Tu carried on her work in the 1960s and 70s, including during China's Cultural Revolution.
During her early years in research, Tu studied Lobelia chinensis, a traditional Chinese medicine believed to be useful for treating schistosomiasis, caused by trematodes which infect the urinary tract or the intestines, which was widespread in the first half of the 20th century in South China.
In 1967, during the Vietnam War, President Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai for help in developing a malaria treatment for his soldiers trooping down the Ho Chi Minh trail, where a majority came down with a form of malaria which is resistant to chloroquine. Because malaria was also a major cause of death in China's southern provinces, especially Guangdong and Guangxi, Zhou Enlai convinced Mao Zedong to set up a secret drug discovery project named Project 523 after its starting date, May 23, 1967.
In early 1969, Tu was appointed head of the Project 523 research group at her institute. Tu was initially sent to Hainan, where she studied patients who had been infected with the disease.
Scientists worldwide had screened over 240,000 compounds without success. In 1969, Tu, then 39 years old, had an idea of screening Chinese herbs. She first investigated the Chinese medical classics in history, visiting practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine all over the country on her own. She gathered her findings in a notebook called A Collection of Single Practical Prescriptions for Anti-Malaria. Her notebook summarized 640 prescriptions. By 1971, her team had screened over 2,000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal extracts, from some 200 herbs, which were tested on mice.
One compound was effective, sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), which was used for "intermittent fevers," a hallmark of malaria. As Tu also presented at the project seminar, its preparation was described in a 1,600-year-old text, in a recipe titled, "Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One's Sleeve". At first, it was ineffective because they extracted it with traditional boiling water. Tu discovered that a low-temperature extraction process could be used to isolate an effective anti-malarial substance from the plant. Tu was also influenced by a traditional Chinese herbal medicine source, The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments, written in 340 by Ge Hong, which states that this herb should be steeped in cold water. This book instructed the reader to immerse a handful of qinghao in the equivalent of 0.4 liters of water, wring out the juice, and drink it all. After rereading the recipe, Tu realized the hot water had already damaged the active ingredient in the plant. Therefore, she proposed a method using low-temperature ether to extract the effective compound instead. Animal tests showed it was completely effective in mice and monkeys.
In 1972, Tu and her colleagues obtained the pure substance and named it qinghaosu, or artemisinin in English. This substance saved millions of lives, especially in the developing world. Tu also studied the chemical structure and pharmacology of artemisinin. Tu's group first determined the chemical structure of artemisinin. In 1973, Tu was attempting to confirm the carbonyl group in the artemisinin molecule when she accidentally synthesized dihydroartemisinin.
Tu volunteered to be the first human test subject. It was safe, so she conducted successful clinical trials with human patients. Her work was published anonymously in 1977. In 1981, she presented the findings related to artemisinin at a meeting with the World Health Organization.
For her work on malaria, Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine on October 5, 2015.
Tu Youyou was promoted to Researcher, the highest researcher rank in mainland China equivalent to the academic rank of a full professor in 1980, shortly after the beginning of the Chinese economic reform in 1978. In 2001, she was promoted to academic advisor for doctoral candidates. As of 2023, she was the chief scientist of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences.
Before 2011, Tu Youyou had been obscure for decades, and was almost completely forgotten by the Chinese people. However, after receiving the Lasker Prize and the Nobel Prize, today Tu is regarded as the "Three-Without Scientist"[ – a scientist with no postgraduate degree (there was no postgraduate education then in China), no study or research experience abroad, and no membership in either of the Chinese national academies, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Tu is also now regarded as a representative figure of the first generation of Chinese medical workers after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
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