人物 | 屠呦呦 Tu Youyou
英国广播公司(BBC)发起的“20世纪最具标志性人物”票选活动，在公布的“科学家篇”名单中，中国首位诺贝尔生理学或医学奖得主屠呦呦成功进入候选人名单。
抗疟药青蒿素和双氢青蒿素的发现者屠呦呦“打败”了斯蒂芬·霍金、马克斯·普朗克(德国物理学家，量子力学的创始人)等人，与发现了镭和钋的物理学家玛丽·居里、帮助人类理解宇宙的物理学家阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦、“计算机之父”阿兰·图灵这三位杰出的科学家一道，成为科学领域的候选人。
BBC“20世纪最具标志性人物”评选分为包括科学家在内的7个版块，总计入围28位候选人。值得骄傲的是，屠呦呦是科学家领域唯一在世的候选人，也是28位候选人中唯一的亚洲人。
Tu studied at the department of pharmaceutics of Beijing Medical College. After earning a degree there in 1955, she was chosen to join the Institute of Materia Medica at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (later the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences). From 1959 to 1962, she participated in a full-time training course in the use of traditional Chinese medicine that was geared toward researchers with knowledge of Western medicine. The course provided a foundation for her later application of traditional Chinese medical knowledge to modern drug discovery.
In 1967, during the Vietnam War (1954–75), Tu was appointed to lead Project 523, a covert effort to discover a treatment for malaria. The project was initiated by the Chinese government at the urging of allies in North Vietnam, where malaria had claimed the lives of numerous soldiers. Tu and her team of researchers began by identifying plants with supposed activity against malaria on the basis of information from folk medicine and remedies described in ancient Chinese medical texts. Her team identified some 640 plants and more than 2,000 remedies with potential antimalarial activity and subsequently tested 380 extracts from about 200 of the plant species for their ability to rid malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites from the blood of infected mice. An extract obtained from the sweet wormwood plant (qinghao), Artemisia annua, showed particular promise. In 1971, after refining the extraction process, Tu and colleagues successfully isolated a nontoxic extract from sweet wormwood that effectively eliminated Plasmodium parasites from mice and monkeys. Clinical studies were soon thereafter carried out in malaria patients, in whom sweet wormwood extracts were found to quickly lower fever and reduce parasite levels in the blood. In 1972 Tu and colleagues isolated the active compound in the extracts, which they named qinghaosu, or artemisinin.
Although Tu had relied on information from ancient texts, the works said little about the plant known as qinghao, and many of her team’s early attempts to reproduce their initial findings on the plant’s antimalarial activity failed. Eventually, however, Tu discovered that the leaves of sweet wormwood contain artemisinin and that the compound is extracted optimally at relatively low temperatures. Tu initially was prevented from publishing her team’s findings, because of restrictions on the publication of scientific information that were in place in China at the time. The work finally reached international audiences, to wide acclaim, in the early 1980s. In the early 2000s, the World Health Organization recommended the use of artemisinin-based combination drug therapies as first-line treatment for malaria.
Tu continued to investigate artemisinin and developed a second antimalarial compound, dihydroartemisinin, which is a bioactive artemisinin metabolite. In 2011 she received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her contributions to the discovery of artemisinin.