Tu Youyou discovered artemisinin in 1972. Here are the key details about this discovery_

Tu Youyou discovered artemisinin in 1972. Here are the key details about this discovery:

Context: The discovery was made during Project 523, a secret Chinese government initiative to find new treatments for malaria, which was launched in 1967.

Process: Tu Youyou and her team screened over 2,000 traditional Chinese medicine recipes for potential antimalarial compounds.

Breakthrough: In 1971, they found a reference to sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) in a 1,600-year-old text that described using it to treat fever.

Extraction: Tu developed a method to extract the active compound from the plant using low-temperature ether extraction.

First isolation: The team successfully isolated artemisinin (initially called qinghaosu in Chinese) in 1972.

Confirmation: The antimalarial properties of artemisinin were confirmed through subsequent tests on mice and monkeys, and later in human clinical trials.

Publication: The discovery was first published in Chinese in 1977 and introduced to the Western scientific community in the early 1980s.

Recognition: Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015 for her discovery, sharing it with two other scientists for their work on parasitic diseases.

This discovery in 1972 led to the development of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), which have become the standard treatment for malaria worldwide.