“The story I will tell today is about the diligence and dedication of Chinese scientists during the search for antimalarial drugs from traditional Chinese medicine forty years ago under considerably under-resourced research conditions.”
— Tu Youyou, Nobel Lecture at Karolinska Institutet (2015)
Tu Youyou is a pharmaceutical chemist who spent decades working in relative obscurity before the world recognized what she had accomplished. In 1972, working from ancient Chinese medical texts during a secret government project, she isolated artemisinin, a compound that would go on to save millions of lives from malaria. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015, becoming the first Chinese woman to earn that distinction.
When she delivered her Nobel Lecture at Karolinska Institutet, she was 84 years old, and she chose to open not with personal triumph but with collective memory. The words she selected are quietly remarkable. She does not say “my discovery” or “my work.” She says “the story I will tell” is about diligence and dedication, shared across a generation of scientists whose names most people will never know.
The phrase “considerably under-resourced research conditions” carries real weight. This was not a well-funded laboratory with modern equipment. This was painstaking, methodical work done under difficult circumstances, guided in part by a 1,600-year-old medical handbook. That such conditions produced a life-saving breakthrough is the point she is quietly making.
Her opening is an act of generosity toward her colleagues and her country’s scientific tradition, offered from the highest stage in her field. She arrived at the Nobel podium and immediately turned the spotlight elsewhere.
