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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 Physio logy 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 k ills 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 w ere 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 w as 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
w ell.
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 "Artemisin in"(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."
