Unit 20 New FrontiersOn October 5, Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her role in creating a drug that helped cure malaria in Africa and Asia, saving millions of lives
Tu was born in Ningbo in 1930
She chose medicine when she left Zhejiang and headed to Beijing to further her studies in 1951
She attended the Peking University School of Medicine and graduated from its Department of Pharmacology four years later
From university Tu moved to the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Then, in 1969, Tu was tasked with searching for a new malaria treatment and was sent to Hainan
There she saw a lot of children who were in the latest stages of malaria
“Those kids died very quickly,” she said
But it was in ancient Chinese books that Tu found the key to beatin