Could ancient textbooks be the source of the next medical breakthrough?

The discovery that won the latest Nobel Prize for Medicine wouldn’t have been much of a revelation to doctors in ancient China. Pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou established that the compound artemisinin could treat malaria in the early 1970s. But the plant the chemical comes from, Artemisia annua L. (sweet wormwood), was used to treat fevers perhaps caused by malaria as early as the third or fourth century CE.

Tu discovered the properties of artemisinin (qinghaosu in Chinese) after reading traditional Chinese texts that dated to this era listing medicinal herb preparations. The route to the discovery and its dissemination was not easy due to both the difficulties of trawling through and testing hundreds of plant samples and the political climate in China in the 70s. Fortunately, persistence paid off and artemisinin is now a key antimalarial drug.