Yu Youyou. [Photo/Xinhua]

Tu Youyou

Who is she?

Pharmacologist

What she has achieved?

With her soft smile, she looks like an amiable granny who anyone might have. She is Tu Youyou, who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discoveries of a new therapy against malaria. She is the first Chinese female scientist to win the Nobel Prize. Her studies were inspired by traditional Chinese medicine theories and she extracted artemisinin in 1972 after hundreds of failures. Artemisinin has saved more than 200 million Africans suffering from malaria since 2000. Just as Tu said, "Artemisinin is a gift to the world from Traditional Chinese Medicine".

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