Editor's note: The year 2015 witnessed some major breakthroughs by Chinese people in science, such as winning China's first Nobel Prize and rolling out the first large-scale domestically manufactured passenger airplane. Let's take a look back on some of the year's most remarkable achievements.
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William Campbell, Satoshi Komura and Tu Youyou jointly won the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine for their work against parasitic diseases. [Photo/CFP] |
Tu wins China's first medicine Nobel Prize
Chinese scientist Tu Youyou was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her contribution in fighting malaria. The 84-year-old won the prize for her work using artemisinin to treat malaria based on a traditional Chinese herb treatment, making her China's first medicine Nobel laureate.
In late 1960s, Tu started to chair a government project aimed at eradicating malaria. To find a new treatment to fight the disease, Tu and her colleagues looked through many ancient medical books and screened 2,000 recipes before they extracted artemisinin from sweet wormwood, a traditional Chinese herb.
Related: Tu, nation's first winner of Nobel Prize in Medicine