After 2,000 years of practice and decades of scientific research, China this year won a Nobel Prize for a discovery derived from traditional Chinese medicine.
Tu Youyou was awarded for identifying malaria drug artemisinin — “a gift that traditional Chinese medicine has for the world”, she said, on accepting the prize.
Now thousands of researchers in the private and public sectors across China are continuing the struggle to replicate her achievement, seeking to simplify the complex, little understood and difficult to administer treatments prescribed by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to derive products that can be sold across the globe.