Question 1

Who was Tu Youyou?

Accepted Answer

The Chinese scientist who discovered **artemisinin**, the compound that became the basis of the most effective malaria treatment available — work done during the Cultural Revolution, in poor conditions, with no doctorate, no overseas training and no membership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

**The context.** In 1967, during the Vietnam War, malaria was killing large numbers of soldiers and existing drugs were failing as resistance spread. A secret military research programme, **Project 523**, was established in China to find a new treatment. Tu was appointed to lead one team.

**The method.** Her group reviewed **traditional Chinese medical texts and folk remedies**, collecting and screening thousands of preparations. Sweet wormwood, *Artemisia annua*, appeared repeatedly in sources for treating fevers.

**The crucial insight, which is the memorable part.** Initial extracts worked inconsistently. Returning to a fourth-century text describing the plant being **steeped in cold water** rather than boiled, she reasoned that **heat was destroying the active compound**, and switched to a low-temperature ether extraction.

**The result was a preparation that killed the parasite in 100% of tested cases** in animal models.

**She reportedly volunteered as one of the first human subjects**, with colleagues, before wider trials — the programme having no established safety pathway.

**Why recognition took so long.** The work was **secret and published anonymously** under collective authorship, as was standard; it appeared in Chinese journals largely unread abroad; and the political environment did not encourage individual credit. **The drug saved very large numbers of lives for decades before the West knew who had found it.**

**What it became.** Artemisinin-based combination therapies are now the standard first-line treatment for falciparum malaria, and are estimated to have saved millions of lives.

**She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015**, aged 84 — the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel, and among the few laureates without a doctorate.

**Artemisinin resistance is now emerging**, which is the ongoing concern.

Question 2

Who was Henrietta Lacks?

Accepted Answer

A Black American woman whose cancer cells, taken without her knowledge or consent in 1951, became the first human cell line to survive and multiply indefinitely in culture — and which have since

Question 3

Who was Dorothy Hodgkin?

Accepted Answer

A British chemist who used X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structures of biologically critical molecules — including penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin — and who remains the

Question 4

Who was Ignaz Semmelweis and why was he ignored?

Accepted Answer

A Hungarian physician who discovered that handwashing dramatically reduced deaths in childbirth — and was rejected, ridiculed and ultimately institutionalised for it. The observation. Working at the

Question 5

Did Marie Curie really carry radium around in her pocket?

Accepted Answer

Yes. By her own account she kept tubes of radium and polonium in her pocket and in her desk drawer, and enjoyed looking at them glowing faintly in the dark laboratory at night. The dangers of

Question 6

Was there really a curse of Tutankhamun?

Accepted Answer

No — the curse was substantially a press invention of the 1920s, and the mortality figures for those actually present do not support it. Where it came from. Howard Carter opened the tomb in November

Question 7

Who was Alice Ball?

Accepted Answer

A chemist who developed the first effective treatment for leprosy — at 23, in about a year — and who died before publishing it, after which her work was taken and published by the man who had been

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