ABOVE: Tasked with finding a cure for malaria in the early 1970s, Institute of Chinese Materia Medica researcher Tu Youyou scoured texts spanning thousands of years for traditional remedies. Tu successfully derived a drug called artemisinin from sweet wormwood and tested it in animals. She and two colleagues then tested the treatment on themselves to make sure it wasn’t toxic before they began clinical trials. The work earned her a Nobel Prize in 2015.
© Xinhua News Agency / Contributor
Long before there were rumors of COVID parties, there were “filth parties,” and the guest lists were exclusive. Joseph Goldberger, an infectious disease expert in the US Public Health Service, was tasked in 1914 with determining the cause of pellagra, a deadly systemic disease. Many physicians of the time believed pellagra stemmed from an unknown microbe, but Goldberger felt strongly, and correctly, that it was the result of a nutritional ...
