Out of the Cultural Revolution, a Nobel Prize and a cure for malaria
October 14, 2015 8:51 AM   Subscribe

Earlier this month, Youyou Tu was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for her discovery of artemisinin, also known as qinghaosu. She is the first Chinese Nobel recipient for work that was done in mainland China. Dr. Tu's studies were done in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a politically precarious time for Chinese academics, which adds a layer of historical complexity to her work. It is difficult to overstate the importance of artemisinin to anti-malarial efforts. Unfortunately, artemisinin-resistant strains of malaria are already beginning to appear only thirty years after the drug was introduced.
posted by sciatrix (12 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Mod note: Couple comments removed. As a person who likes puns more than he should, I'm gonna suggest maybe we just all silently recite our name-based puns in our heads and move on to discussing out loud the literally anything else about Tu's work and its context.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:20 AM on October 14, 2015 [14 favorites]


In reading Sonia Shah's The Fever (excellent book, highly recommend, there are some problems, but on the whole it is amazing and enjoyable to read), she talks about how the slow pace of introducing cheap artemisinin drugs caused people to dilute the pills they already had in order to stretch them, or to sell more doses for the amount that they had bought for a pharmacy. She lays the responsibility for artemisinin-resistant strains at the feet of those who were slow to get artemisinin drugs to the people who live in endemic areas.

In reading the other links, I find it interesting that the there is a view that scientists in China are now practicing salami slicing science (finding the smallest quanta of publishable work and sending that out) which is hurting their current research. Can anyone in the sciences speak to this in their field? Also, I thought this was somewhat common in all countries, at least for new researchers trying to get a bunch of publications out.
posted by Hactar at 9:37 AM on October 14, 2015


Can you elaborate on the "salami slicing" thing? I'm not a scientist and don't quite understand what you mean or what effect this would have on research.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:42 AM on October 14, 2015


"Only" thirty years? That's pretty good, considering the lag for antibiotics is usually about 5 years.

That said, artemisinin is awesome. The Gates funded semi-synthetic version is another great piece of research, making the plant-based compound in yeast ($$).
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 9:42 AM on October 14, 2015


Sangermaine, the idea of salami slicing is that, like trying to get incredibly thin slices at a deli, you try to publish as many papers as possible based on your work, with each paper being about a small part of it, rather than writing a paper about the actual interesting results. I could be misremembering, I cannot think of where I first encountered the idea.
posted by Hactar at 10:01 AM on October 14, 2015


from the 'historical complexity' link: The fact that the 523 Project ‘incidentally’ protected hundreds of researchers from political persecution is a chilling reminder for every Chinese to remember.

Doesn't it become an ultimate irony that women scientists like Tu may have been BETTER protected by the 523 Project than in Western/American science where Nobel Prize winners are now known to have routinely sexually harassed women and stolen credit from them.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:22 AM on October 14, 2015


No? The line you quote discusses political persecution, not sexual harassment.

The role and treatment of women in Communist countries is a complex topic, but while in some ways women enjoyed better treatment than in the West these places weren't free of sexual harassment.

Mao famously said that “women hold up half the sky", but how much this was put into practice is a fraught topic.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:35 AM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


The personal and political sides of this story are fascinating.

When I was a grad student, I had a few friends who were children during the cultural revolution in China. To this day, many of them described how ...authorities put their parents into labor camps for re-education, shut down schools, and the general population barely had enough to eat. So it blows my mind that anyone managed to do actual research, let alone academic research, during this time period.

The other aspect of this story that was fascinating to me was this:

But it was in ancient Chinese manuscripts that Tu found the key to beating the disease. Back in Beijing, Tu and her team scoured books about traditional Chinese medicine for leads on substances that might help them defeat malaria.

In a hundreds-of-years-old text, The Manual of Clinical Practice and Emergency Remedies by Ge Hong of the East Jin Dynasty, they found mention of sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) – or in Chinese qinghao – being used to treat malaria.


I've always been taught that when citing articles for a manuscript, to not go back more than 5 years or the science might already be out of date. So my mind exploded with the idea that they might have found a lead in an ancient manuscript.

Really cool, thanks for posting this.
posted by Wolfster at 11:56 AM on October 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


I wonder sometimes how much humanity has known and forgotten. This treatment for malaria, the cure for scurvy... what else is waiting out there in ancient texts, or maybe lost to the place where oral histories go when nobody speaks them anymore?
posted by Andrhia at 2:36 PM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've always been taught that when citing articles for a manuscript, to not go back more than 5 years or the science might already be out of date. So my mind exploded with the idea that they might have found a lead in an ancient manuscript.

Ha! My PhD dissertation is heavily based on a drug that was heavily studied in the 1980s in a totally different field from me, and most of the relevant information I care about comes from papers that are at least twenty years old. Another part of my dissertation involves hunting down a bunch of old ideas in the scientific literature and figuring out how a particular concept grew out of a piece of theory and how (what I consider) a misconception solidified in the minds of the collective field. Plus all of what passes for natural history in the species I work on was published in the 1920s and 1930s. I have written grant applications where the average age of citation was somewhere around 1995 before. The thing about science is that it has fads and fashions and bandwagons and what people work on is heavily influenced by those, so often if you want to look closely at what we know about a particular, specific topic you have to look back into the literature a bit.

It's really interesting to see what norms for age of paper citing are in different disciplines! Mine is heavily interdisciplinary and my advisor encourages us to read very broadly and borrow concepts from older work, as long as we're aware of the limitations of that work and the places where inaccuracies might appear.
posted by sciatrix at 5:41 PM on October 14, 2015


It's really interesting to see what norms for age of paper citing are in different disciplines!

Yeah, I almost commented on that earlier - I'm a biomed grad student, and around here we get scolded if we only cite the recent papers repeating something instead of tracking down the original paper for a particular technique or discovery (since they deserve the credit, even years later). At least within pubmed limits - we aren't expected to go quite as far back as Dr. Tu did!
posted by randomnity at 5:59 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think this is one of the coolest facts about her:
My [first] name, Youyou, was given by my father, who adapted it from the sentence ‘呦呦鹿鸣, 食野之蒿’[16] translated as ‘Deer bleat “youyou” while they are eating the wild Hao’ in the Chinese Book of Odes. How this links my whole life with qinghao will probably remain an interesting coincidence forever.
— Tu Youyou, when interviewed in 2011 after awarded the 2011 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award[17]
- Wikipedia
posted by destrius at 11:56 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


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