the person i admire

The researcher Tu Youyou born in Ningbo, Republic of China on December 30, 1930 is a scientist, doctor and Chinese pharmaceutical chemistry almost unknown in her own country, who has become the first Chinese woman to receive a Nobel Prize in any of its fields besides being the first scientist with this nationality who receives the Precious award.

84-year-old student of the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine Tu shared the Nobel Prize with Irishman William Campbell and the Japanese Satoshi Omura for his advances in the fight against parasitic diseases, which in the case of the doctor focused on combat against malaria.

She is known to discover artemisinin (also known as dihydroartemisinin), with ancient medical texts and folk remedies of her land, isolated 2,000 potential drugs and made 380 extracts. Used to treat malaria, with which saved millions of lives.

My admiration for this scientist is because her discovery has been the result of a lifetime of work facing various adverse situations, as her discovery goes back to research in the 60s and 70s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when scientists were considered counterrevolutionary and were not allowed to continue with their investigations, even so Tu did not surrender and persisted. In addition, it marked a milestone to have based their research on traditional Chinese medicine, a discipline that is not always recognized in the West because of its base empirical.