China’s first Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine was 419 years in the making. Tu Youyou, an 85 year-old chemist, won last year’s prize for her work in the 1970s developing artemisinin as a malaria treatment.
She had been alerted to the potential of artemisinin — an extract from the sweet wormwood plant — after scouring Chinese literature in search of traditional herbal remedies for the disease.
Records of sweet wormwood, or Artemisia annua, being used against malaria date back to at least 1596, when Li Shizhen, a Chinese medical scholar, suggested that it be given to patients as a tea.
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