Blog Post #6 - Unit 8 (Innovations)

Discovery of Artemisinin

Have you heard about malaria? It is an infectious disease caused by mosquito. When a person is bitten, parasites in the mosquito’s saliva come into the person’s blood. Generally, it is concerned with poverty so that it especially appears in poor countries. It is one of the reasons that a million of people are dying in tropical developing nations. But, Dr. Tu Youyou, a Chinese medical scientist and pharmaceutical chemist, found out artemisinin used to treat malaria and it saved a lot of people suffering from malaria.

Her discovery is significant because it means an improvement of human health. For example, this substance has rescued numerous patients who contracted malaria in developing countries. Only in Africa, approximately 10 million people survive every year by the substance she discovered. Furthermore, it helps relieving their terrifying pain. After 10 or 15 days from biting, infected people usually can feel the symptoms of malaria such as fatigue, fever, headache, vomiting. In the severe case, it leads to yellow skin, seizures, coma and death. It means that patients can be free from the pain of malaria.

And her discovery is important car it promoted integrated traditional Chinese and modern western medicine. She found artemisinin from sweet wormwood, traditional medicinal herb in China. It is because she was very interested in chinese medicinal herbs. After her discovery, China has produced large amounts of it. Now, it results in that China has become the biggest producer and exporter of arteminisin. At first, she tried to find some information from Chinese classic literature 1600 years ago. And her idea that arteminisin can be extracted from sweet wormwood occurred to her mind from the ancient book. She failed it 190 times but succeed in 191th attempt.

Her discovery is regarded as an important detection and new direction of medicinal field. Her passion for medicine and chemistry became a great discovery. As a result, she was selected as first Chinese winner of Novel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015 in recognition of her service to the field.