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On December 30, 1930, the New Year's bell was about to ring, and a girl from the Ningbo Tu family fell to the ground.
The Yongshang Tu clan is a family of eastern Zhejiang, and its family has been an official eunuch family for generations. According to the "Yongshang Tu Family Tree", in the first year of the Southern Song Dynasty, the Ancestors of the Tu Family moved from Wuxi, Jiangsu province to Ningbo, Zhejiang, and have a history of more than 700 years. This big family of celebrities has emerged from generations, such as the official Shangshu, the prince Taifu Andi Taibao Tu, the literary scholar and playwright Tu Long, and the naturalist Tu Benyi.
Tu Ruled the I Ching and the Book of Poetry in the Ming Dynasty, and the girl's father routinely quoted the Book of Poetry to name her "Yo Yo", which originated from "Yo Yo Deer Singing, The Apple of the Wild... Yo yo deer singing, wild artemisia... Yo yo deer singing, eating wild mustard...".
The girl's mother, who was from the Yao clan of Yin County, was a descendant of Yao Guangren, the brother of Yao Guangxiao, the Duke of Rongguo, the founder of the Ming Dynasty. Tu Youyou's maternal grandfather, Yao Yongbai, was in charge of the National Treasury of the Republic of China, the first director of the Treasury Department of the Ministry of Finance, and the executive director of the Central Bank.
Ningbo Haishu District Kaiming Street No. 26 Yao House, Tu Youyou former residence
Tu Youyou was born into a family of chaebols and scholars, and the reason why she embarked on the road of medical research was because of a serious illness in adolescence. Because Tu Youyou had tuberculosis, she had to take a two-year break from school at the age of 16. After Tu Youyou returned to school, she had a strong thirst for knowledge and hoped to find a cure for this disease. So she set her sights on medicine.
Female college students in the fifties can be described as one of the best. In 1951, Tu Youyou was admitted to the Department of Pharmacy of Peking University School of Medicine, majoring in pharmacy. After completing two and a half years of training in Chinese medicine, she was assigned to the Institute of Chinese Medicine of the Chinese Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which was directly under the Ministry of Health, which later became the Chinese Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. Since then, Tu Youyou's entire career has been spent here.
Tu Youyou when you were studying
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Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize because she and her team tackled a worldwide problem – fighting malaria.
Malaria is life-threatening and the most contagious disease in the world, with Africa being the most affected. In the late 1960s, the parasite became resistant to antimalarial drugs, posing a major global challenge to the prevalence of malaria and the rise in mortality.
This conundrum plagues many world-class research institutions, including the U.S. Army Laboratory. In the 1960s, the Walter Reed Army Research Institute in Washington, D.C., spearheaded a series of projects to study new malaria treatments. As of 1972, the institute had tested more than 214,000 compounds, all without success.
On May 23, 1967, China began to implement the 523 key military project to find a cure for malaria. In 1969, at the age of 39, Tu Youyou was appointed head of the research team of the Chinese Medical Research Institute. Dare to challenge and conquer such a difficult problem, Tu Youyou's courage, perseverance and wisdom are admired by the world. In a difficult and turbulent environment, she and other Chinese scientists worked to find antimalarial drugs in traditional Chinese medicine.
In order to devote herself to her work, Tu Youyou had to leave her one-year-old daughter to her parents and put her four-year-old daughter in a full-time nursery. It was three years later that she saw the children again, and when she returned, her daughter did not know her.
Tu Youyou's visionary research on malaria treatment is rooted in ancient Chinese medicine. Initially, she spent years in the rainforests of southern China, studying the devastating consequences of malaria. Subsequently, she and the working group consulted a large number of ancient medical classics, visited the living old Chinese medicine practitioners in various places, inspected the folk prescriptions, selected about 2,000 kinds of anti-malaria prescriptions, and compiled the "Malaria Single Test Formula Collection" based on more than 640 kinds of chinese medicines on the basis of bringing together more than 2,000 kinds of internal and external prescription drugs including plants, animals, minerals, etc. Finally, the research team targeted the extraction of antimalarial drugs from Artemisia annua. In order to successfully extract artemisinin, Tu Youyou experienced at least 190 failures.
After the successful isolation of artemisinin, in order to complete the safety assessment before the end of the malaria epidemic season, Tu Youyou followed the example of Shennong's practice of tasting hundreds of herbs, willingly became a guinea pig, and voluntarily became the first human test subject. Because of her exemplary role, other investigators also volunteered to participate in dose increase studies without any side effects, and it was this safety assessment conducted by the researchers themselves that bought them valuable time to start and complete clinical trials in a timely manner.
Later, after a clinical trial of malaria patients, they all recovered. Finally, artemisinin was recognized and promoted. In the 1980s, thousands of malaria patients in China received effective treatment with artemisinin and its derivatives, and the results showed that artemisinin-based drugs had the characteristics of "high efficiency, rapidity and low toxicity".
In the early 20th century, the World Health Organization finally recommended the use of artemisinin-based combination therapy as the first line of defense against malaria. Over the decades, more than 200 million people with malaria have received artemisinin, or artemisinin-based combinations. In 2011, the Lasker Foundation awarded Tu youyou the Prize for Clinical Medical Research, calling the discovery of artemisinin "the most important drug intervention of the past half century."
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Tu Youyou, 85, won the Nobel Prize, photo: Reuters
"Every scientist dreams of doing something that will help the world." Tu Youyou said. When Tu Youyou, 85, won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, her talk was titled "The Discovery of Artemisinin: A Gift from Traditional Chinese Medicine to the World."
Tu Youyou is the first scientist in Chinese mainland to win the Nobel Prize in Science, she has no doctorate, academician title, nor training abroad, but it is such a "three no scientists" who use traditional Chinese medicine to make great contributions to contemporary mankind.
In its address to Tu Youyou, the Nobel Committee wrote: "Artemisinin, a major discovery in the history of medical development, saves the lives of millions of malaria patients around the world every year, especially in developing countries. ”
Matt Ridley, a British popular science writer and Oxford PhD, once said that he had an incredibly privileged background, both the best innate and the best acquired. Tu Youyou's deeds also vividly and vividly demonstrate the important role of innate and acquired interaction in talent training. The combination of genes after the famous door, superior family education and higher education at Peking University has become a prerequisite for her success.
Tu Youyou's name has the shadow of the green grass on the field, and also conveys the good wishes and expectations of her parents. The innate conditions created by her parents enabled her to inherit the family style and obtain a high-quality education, and Tu Youyou later became acquainted with Chinese herbal medicine, and after struggling to become a generation of people, made outstanding contributions to the world, relying on her decades of hard work, with firm faith and dedication to devote herself to science.
The International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center did a romantic thing after Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize. In recognition of her contribution, the center announced the naming of asteroid 31230 "Tu You You Star."
When Tu Youyou made a Nobel Prize speech, she shared with you at the end the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Zhizhuo's "Climbing the Stork and Bird Tower": The day is at the end of the mountain, the Yellow River flows into the sea, and you want to go to a higher level.
Over eighty years old, Tu Youyou has not yet retired. Now, she is a tenured researcher at the Chinese Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences and director of the Artemisinin Research Center, and she continues to benefit the world with her academic talent and international influence. Tu Youyou pointed out that there is abuse of artemisinin. She is working to call on the international community to regulate treatment for malaria and stop the abuse of artemisinin in order to avoid a more serious problem of malaria parasite resistance.
Only by ascending can we look far, and only by climbing can we move forward. Today, there are also Tu Youyou Stars in the sky guiding us to forge ahead and work hard. If your ability is limited, be yourself, and if you can, benefit others.
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"The Discovery of Artemisinin: The Gift of Traditional Chinese Medicine to the World" - The full text of Tu Youyou's speech
Women who changed science | Tu Youyou - The Nobel Prize
Tu Youyou's life is revealed: both parents are famous and prestigious families in Ningbo