Wisdom, ancient and modern

IT IS easy, in the arrogance of scientific advance, to forget that less than a century and a half ago most medicines were herbal remedies. To this day, some of the best-known, including aspirin, morphine and digitalis, are either made from plants or based on plant molecules. So the fact that artemisinin, the newest treatment for malaria, is derived from a plant used for that purpose in China for well over 2,000 years should be no surprise. The earliest recipe consulted by artemisinin’s discoverer, Tu Youyou, was “The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies”, written in 340BC by Ge Hong (depicted alongside). It gave her helpful hints on how to extract the herb’s active principle.

Artemisinin has played a pivotal role in the halving, since 2000, of the number of deaths inflicted by malaria (see article). Dr Tu was therefore a laudable winner of a share in this year’s Nobel prize for physiology or medicine. She took an idea she had developed originally in a secret Chinese project designed to help keep North Vietnamese soldiers malaria-free during the Vietnam war, and pushed it forward to become the saviour of a field in which existing drugs were becoming less and less useful, because of the evolution of resistance to them by the parasite that causes malaria.