INTERNATIONAL
This file photo from the 1950s shows pharmacologist Tu Youyou ( R ) at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing. Tu became the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel prize for medicine. Tu said she was not really surprised to be recognised after a remarkable career which saw her team test a breakthrough malaria drug on themselves during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Project 523, was set up in 1967 by Chairman Mao Zedong, who wanted to help Communist troops fighting in the mosquito-ridden jungles of Vietnam, where they were losing more soldiers to malaria than bullets.
Tu scoured ancient texts and folk manuals and traveled to remote parts of the country for clues, ultimately collecting 2,000 potential remedies. One of the compounds she tested reduced the number of malaria parasites. Derived from sweet wormwood, its use as a treatment for malaria was first recorded in 1600 years ago in China, when a manual recommended drinking juice extracted from the plant. Her discovery resulted in the drug artemisinin -- humankinds best defense against the mosquito-borne disease, which kills 450,000 people each year.
Takaaki Kajita, a professor at the University of Tokyo Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, smiles after it was announced he had won the Nobel Physics Prize, at the University of Tokyo on Oct 6, with co-winner Arthur McDonald of Canada, for resolving a mystery about neutrinos, subatomic particles with almost no mass that rarely interact with anything else, making them very difficult to study. The pair were honoured for work that helped determine that neutrinos have mass, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
