The Nobel Prize, one of the world's most famous awards, honors talented people in different areas. Before 2015, no Chinese scientists had won one in the area of Natural Sciences. But on October 15th, 2015, Tu Youyou earned one for herself. And she became the second Chinese person to win a Nobel Prize after Mo Yan.
Tu, now is 89 years old, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She shared the prize with two other scientists from the United States and Japan.
Tu was awarded for finding artemisinin(青蒿素), a type of anti-malaria(抗疟疾)medicine. Her finding helped save the lives of more than 6.2 million people who suffered from malaria in the world between 2000 and 2015, according to the World Health Organization.
"Tu's win showed that Chinese scientists are able to win Nobel Prize. It highly improved our confidence in science," Zhang Boli, president of China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, told Xinhua newspaper.
Tu is a researcher at the academy. In the late 1960s, Tu and her team started a project to find a new malaria medicine. At that time, more than 240,000 things had already been tested, but failed. But Tu didn't give up. She read medical books from ancient China and found that the plant Qinghao was once used to treat malaria. However, crude extracts(粗萃取物)of the plant was not easy. In the hope of saving others' lives, she tried hard. In 1971, after over 190 failures, she and her team succeeded.
Though she was seriously ill because of long-term study, she volunteered to be the first person to test the medicine. Tu Youyou is a real hero in my heart.
