China Real Time ReportToday, 14:38
This photo taken Nov. 15, 2011 and released by Xinhua News Agency Monday, Oct. 5, 2015 shows Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou attending a meeting held by the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing. Ms. Tu was awarded the prize for discovering artemisinin, a drug that has helped significantly reduce the mortality rates of malaria patients.
Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou, who won a share of the Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for her discovery of a game-changing malaria treatment, did her seminal work when China was in the midst of the radical movement known as the Cultural Revolution. Her pathbreaking Nobel win is renewing discussion of the way China’s scientific community does research.
The award to Ms. Tu ticks a number of firsts: She’s the first citizen of the People’s Republic to win a science Nobel, the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel for medicine and the first female Chinese citizen to win a Nobel of any kind.
In marveling at that feat, Chinese media have dwelled on Ms. Tu’s lack of academic credentials. The 84-year-old chief professor at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine is without a PhD, without an overseas education and without the title of yuanshi (or academician) given to the country’s top scholars. For that reason, she has been referred to as China’s “three withouts” scientist. Prior to her winning the prestigious Lasker Prize for Medical Research in 2011, she was an obscure figure.
Advertisement
That a future Nobel laureate could be ignored for her lack of traditional accomplishments has renewed attention to an academic system already criticized by many as bureaucratic and unimaginative.
“It seems like every headline I’ve seen today says ”Three-Withouts’ Scientist Tu Youyou Wins Nobel for Medicine.’ That’s not a headline, but a question we should all ponder,” cinematographer Wang Peishan wrote in one of many similar comments on the Twitter-like Weibo social media platform.
Ms. Tu won born at the end of 1930 in the city of Ningbo, in the wealthy eastern province of Zhejiang, according to state media. Former classmates told the state-run Ningbo Daily that she was hardworking and unassuming as a high-school student. “She was just normal. Her clothes were simple. She didn’t attract a lot of attention,” the paper quoted one classmate, Weng Maokang, as saying.
She studied pharmacology at Peking University and then went on to study traditional Chinese medicine. Opportunities to pursue PhD-level education or study abroad were rare at the time in China.
After Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, the country turned violently against elites, including scientists, whose learning made them insufficiently revolutionary and politically suspect. In the midst of that campaign, in 1967, Mao ordered the creation of the secretive 523 program – named for the date it of its inception, May 23—to find a cure for malaria that would help China’s allies in North Vietnam fight South Vietnam and U.S. troops.
In 1969, Ms. Tu was named director of the program, according to state media. She was sent to China’s tropical island of Hainan to study malaria’s effects. “I saw a lot of children who were in the latest stages of malaria,” the New Scientist magazine quoted Ms. Tu as saying in a 2011 article. “Those kids died very quickly.”
In searching for a cure, Ms. Tu and her team scoured traditional Chinese medicinal manuals for remedies that might yield a useful drug. The search ended with a feathery weed called qinghao—also called Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood. The plant contained a chemical that would later become known as artemisinin and proved surprisingly effective in limiting growth of the malaria parasite.
Modifying instructions from a 4th century tome called the “Manual of Clinical Practice and Emergency Remedies,” Ms. Tu and her team found a way to extract artemisinin from the plant—a feat that would go on to revolutionize treatment of malaria. Artemisinin-based therapies have reduced mortality rates from malaria by more than 20% and saved more than 100,000 lives each year in Africa alone, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in a press release Monday.
Because of the secret nature of the malaria project, the Project 523 team never published their findings, according to state media. Only in recent years has Ms. Tu been recognized as the lead scientist in the discovery of artemisinin. That development rankled some who see the drug as the joint accomplishment of a large team of researchers.
After Ms. Tu won the Lasker Award, the grumbling spilled into the open, with local media quoting anonymous scientists questioning whether she deserved the credit.
The newly minted Nobel laureate appeared to address those criticisms in comments to state media on Monday night. “Artemisinin is a gift from Chinese medicine to the rest of the world,” she told the official Xinhua news agency after news broke that she won the award . “The discovery of artemisinin is a successful example of the collective exploration of traditional Chinese medicine.”
Efforts to reach Ms. Tu through her academy have not been successful. In a message posted late Monday night to her verified Weibo account, she said she only learned she’d won the award after seeing the news on TV. “I’m a little surprised, but not completely surprised because this isn’t an individual honor. It’s an honor for all Chinese scientists,” she wrote.
With her award, some commentators are openly wondering whether China’s scientists should return to the radical collectivism and state-directed research that produced Ms. Tu’s accolades. “Which will produce the important results: science and technology workers relying on their own interests to pursue ‘free exploration-style’ research, or conducting ‘needs-based’ research on the basis of national demands?” Jiaotong University engineering professor Wang Yuanfeng wrote in an essay for the Sina news portal on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper People’s Daily appeared to side with critics who describe China’s scientific community as in need of an overhaul. Ms. Tu’s Nobel was a reminder, the newspaper said in a Tuesday editorial: “To these scientists, a more flexible, more diverse system of evaluation and encouragement is crucial. In Japan, many Nobel recipients come from business or civil organizations.”
The Ningbo Daily said Ms. Tu is suffering health problems from having experimented on herself so often as a researcher. It did not provide further details.
– Josh Chin, with contributions from Fanfan Wang and Kersten Zhang
Sign up for CRT’s daily newsletter to get the latest headlines by email.
For the latest news and analysis, follow @ChinaRealTime
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/10/06/chinas-new-nobel-laureate-new-attention-to-an-old-science-problem/?mod=WSJBlog
