Recognition of Traditional Medicine in the Nobel for Artemisinin is Inescapable

On whether or not the award of the Nobel Prize to Youyou Tu for the discovery of artemisinin is a vindication of the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine, it is illuminating to compare certain facts and figures associated with her approach with that of modern antimalarial drug discovery. Tu had tested 200 recipes and 380 herbal extracts, selected on the basis of traditional Chinese medicine literature, in animal models, and identified extracts from Artemisia annua L., the source of artemisinin, with promising parasite growth-inhibiting activity.