Women of science

By TANG YUANKAI

ON the eve of International Womens Day (March 8) in 2007, the China Association for Science and Technology(CAST) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) published research on women working in science and technology. According to the research, China had more than nine million women working in the sector, accounting for almost one third of its workforce. The figure is about the same today. China Today looks at some truly remarkable Chinese women whose work in the labs has been making a big impact.

Tu Youyou, Helping Millions

Last year, Tu Youyou was honored domestically as the “Chinese scientist closest to a Nobel Prize.” The fact that Tu is a woman didnt surprise many – in China, women are increasingly prevalent in the science and technology professions traditionally dominated by men.

Tu Youyou won last years Lasker-Debakey Clinical Medical Research Award, for work completed many years before. This prestigious international award is giv- en annually since 1946 to those who have made major contributions to medical science, and is regarded as a key predictor of up-and-coming Nobel Prize winners. Tu, who worked at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Science for decades, was fully deserving of the award – she discovered Artemisinin, a highly effective antimalaria drug.

By the 1960s, malaria parasites had developed a resistance to Chloroquine and Quinine, the drugs that had been used to combat malaria since the turn of the 20th century. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of people were at risk of the disease; the malaria fatality rate soared, and laboratories around the world raced to find a new treatment drug. China joined this race – on May 23, 1967, the government launched “Project 523” with the goal of beating the disease once and for all.

In 1969, 39-year-old Tu Youyou was appointed as head of the research group at “Project 523.” Despite the groups simple facilities and poor access to overseas resources, Tu and her colleagues quickly began to make progress. They gathered samplings from thousands of species of herbs and analyzed more than 2,000 classic Chinese recipes from dynastic medical records and folk prescriptions.

By 1971, the group had worked on 380 extracts from 200 herbal medicines. One of them from the herb Qinghao (Artemisia carvifolia) was found to prevent the growth of the Malaria parasite in animal bodies. The extract, however, could not be regenerated. To find a solution, Tus group again consulted historical records for a solution.

One day, in a paragraph from the

Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, written by the renowned pharmacist Ge Hong in 340 AD, Tu Youyou read that temperature was a large factor in the vitality of the Qinghao herb extract. She realized that the high temperature at which previous experiments were conducted could have been destroying the extracts active ingredients.

Tu redesigned the extraction process by utilizing aether, which boils at 35oC , to produce the Qinghao extract at temperature below 60oC. This radically improved its medical effectiveness, and on October 4, 1971, after 190 failed experiments, her team finally managed to distill a sample with a 100 percent inhibition ratio against the malaria parasite in rats and monkeys.

On November 8, 1972, Tu Youyou and her colleagues purified the herb down to identify the base chemical so effective against malaria, which turned out to be artemisinin. Chemically, artemisinin is very unusual and its structure proved totally different from all other anti-malaria drugs ever used.

In 1992, Tu developed a new kind of artemisinin, the effectiveness of which is 10 times higher than the original substance, and cheaper, too. In May 2004 the World Health Organization identified artemisinin and its varieties as the first choice in treating malaria, with a cure rate of 97 percent.

independence of thought, she says.

Yu Jihong has tutored nearly 30 masters and doctoral students. Her students appreciate her intelligence and wisdom, and she is also known about campus for her keen sense of fashion. For her, donning the white lab coats doesnt mean forsaking her femininity.

As a “fashionable” scientist, Yu Jihong is by no means alone. Hou Yamei, winner of the first China Youth Female Scientist Award in 2004, is also known for her dress sense. “All women want to embrace their feminine beauty. I am a scientist, but that doesnt mean Ive renounced my gender,” said Hou.

Hou is one of the few women in China dedicated to archaeological study of the Paleolithic period. One day, while working in the desert, her shoes melted because of the heat. “Sometimes I think science, and especially archaeology, can be quite romantic. As in love, if you dont experience hardships, youll never know true happiness,” she said.

Despite long hours buried in research, Hou still finds time to cook at home, and even experiments with her own recipes. When working in the field, she enjoys cooking simple meals for her colleagues.

Ten years ago, Hou became a vegetarian. “While excavating we discovered some interesting prehistoric fossils and I found myself thinking, ‘Why did the earth have more variety of species at that time than today?Besides evolution, increased human activity is the main reason,” said Hou. On reading the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes findings that greenhouse gas emitted from animal husbandry is the main cause of global warming, she decided to cut meat out of her diet.

Many of the last group of Chinas Young Female Scientists laureates – ten every year – are working on environmentrelated subjects. Zhao Yans research, for example, has helped people understand the complexity of climate change, while Hu Min, head of the State Key Laboratory for Environment Simulation and Pollution Control at Peking University, is dedicated to research on the sources of fine particle air pollution and its impact on air quality, human health and climate change.

When it comes to these high achievers, their contribution to the body of scientific knowledge – not their gender – is the story.