Tu Youyou grew up in Ningbo but left for Beijing to study in a university in the 1950s. (Photo : Reuters)
The development of the life-saving malaria drug artemisinin that won Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine this week sprang from a secret military project by the Communist Party of China (CPC), according to U.S.-based Chinese news agency Duowei News.
Tu received half of the total prize valued at 8 million Swedish krona ($960,000) for her contributions to the development of artemisinin, which has been responsible for saving millions of lives in tropical regions all over the world.
According to the report, on May 23, 1967, Mao Zedong assigned Tu to "Project 523" to find an effective treatment for malaria, which at the time was a major cause of death in tropical provinces in southern China.
However, the report said that the real reason the CPC wanted to find a cure for malaria was to support the North Vietnamese communist forces during the Vietnam War, who were dying from the disease, claiming it had become resistant to all known drugs.
Malaria also killed many troops on the U.S.-supported South Vietnam, with the U.S. government supposedly spending a large sum to screen over 200,000 compounds that could cure malaria, of which none worked.
Project 523 employed more than 500 scientists from 60 military and civilian institutes for 14 years, screening at least 40,000 known chemicals.
Tu, who was sent to Hainan Province in 1967, read around 2,000 traditional Chinese medicine texts along with her colleagues upon her return in 1969. Her team prepared 380 herbal remedies that they hoped could cure the disease, with all her findings compiled in a notebook called "A Collection of Single Practical Prescriptions for Anti-Malaria."
In the 1,600-year-old text entitled "Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One's Sleeve," Tu's team found the crucial recipe that contained sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua).
While initial preparations did not work consistently because the herbs were boiled, a later preparation steeped in lower-temperature water, according to a manuscript titled "Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments," proved effective against different forms of malaria parasites.
After Tu reported her findings in March 1972, the government successfully treated malaria in China's Yunnan Province in 1973.
