For Intrigue, Malaria Drug Gets the Prize

Artemisinin’s discovery is being talked about as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Millions of American taxpayer dollars are spent on it for Africa every year.

The Chinese drug artemisinin has been hailed as one of the greatest advances in fighting malaria, the scourge of the tropics, since the discovery of quinine centuries ago.

But few people realize that in one of the paradoxes of history, the drug was discovered thanks to Mao Zedong, who was acting to help the North Vietnamese in their jungle war against the Americans. Or that it languished for 30 years thanks to China’s isolation and the indifference of Western donors, health agencies and drug companies.

Now that story is coming out. But as happens so often in science, versions vary, and multiple contributors are fighting over the laurels. That became particularly clear in September, when one of the Lasker Awards — sometimes called the “American Nobels” — went to a single one of the hundreds of Chinese scientists once engaged in the development of the drug
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