One medical text from the fourth century suggested using the e    1     from sweet wormwood to treat a fever. Tu’s team t    2     a collection of dried wormwood leaves but found no e    3    .They then tried boiling fresh wormwood, and using the l    4     obtained from this to treat malaria, but this did not work either. Their project got s     5    .However, Tu Youyou would not a    6    defeat. She analysed the medical texts a    7    , and by c    8    , she found one sentence suggesting a d    9    way to treat the wormwood. She concluded that boiling the sweet wormwood apparently destroyed its medial p    10    .

Tu Youyou, a c    1     and patient scientist, was born in Ningbo, China, on 30 December 1930, and graduated from Peking University Medical School in1955. After she graduated, she worked at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing. In 1967, the Chinese government f    2     a team of scientists with the o    3     of discovering a new treatment for malaria, and Tu Youyou was among the first researchers c    4    . In the b    5    , Tu Youyou went to Hainan, where malaria was more c    6    , to study malaria patients. In 1969, she became the head of the p    7     in Beijing, and decided to review ancient Chinese medical texts to find traditional b    8     treatments for the disease. Her team examined over 2,000 old medical texts, and evaluated 280,000 plants for their medical properties. From their research, they discovered and tested 380 d    9     ancient Chinese medical treatments that showed p    10     in the fight against malaria.