The US inventor Thomas Alva Edison once said, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. " He was not exaggerating. Perspiration, indeed, plays a very important role in Chinese scientist Tu Youyou's success.
Tu was given the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015 for discovering a new drug for malaria, a deadly disease caused by the bite of some types of mosquito. She is the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize in science. "It is the pride of the whole Chinese science community, which will inspire more Chinese scientists, " China Daily noted.
Malaria is a disease that infects around 200 million people and kills about half a million people each year, according to the Economist. Tu's discovery has saved millions of lives, especially in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, by 2013 malaria deaths had fallen by 47 percent compared with 2000.
But the road to this achievement was a tough one to travel. In the late 1960s, during the "cultural revolution " (1966-1976), Tu joined a government project on which she began research on a new malaria drug.
In the beginning, Tu read a lot of old folk remedies(药方), searched texts that were hundreds or thousands of years old and traveled to remote places.
Over several months, Tu and her team collected over 600 plants and created a list of almost 380 possible remedies.
"This was the most challenging stage of the project, " Tu told The Beijing News. "It was a very labor-demanding and dull job, in particular when you faced one failure after another. "
But the hard work and the dullness failed to break the team's spirit. In the following months, she and her team tested the remedies on malaria-infected mice and they found that an extract(提取物)from the plant qinghao seemed to work well.
Not that the work was easier after that. The fact that the extract didn't always work against malaria discouraged some of her teammates. But Tu was ambitious to make a contribution to the world and so she encouraged her teammates to keep going. They decided to start again from the beginning.
In 1971, they were rewarded for their efforts. After nearly 200 failures, Tu finally made an extract that was 100 percent effective against malaria parasites. The extract was called "Artemisinin(青蒿素)".
"Thanks to decades of hard work, Tu and her team had provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people every year, " said the Nobel Prize Committee. "It has greatly improved human health and reduced suffering. "
