By Merrill Goozner
Nicholas White and François Nosten were not the first clinicians to use artemisinin in a human trial. That honor belongs to Li Guoqian, now a senior professor at the Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (GUTCM).
Military necessity has always been a major driver of antimalarial therapeutic advances, and when Vietnam president Ho Chi Minh asked Chinese Community Party leader Mao Zedong for help in combating a disease that was disabling more of his soldiers than were American bombs during the Vietnam War, traditional Chinese medicine, especially qinghaosu, seemed like a good place to start. (At the time, both Vietnam and China were cut off from global supplies of chloroquine, then the drug of choice for treating malaria.)
Mao, in the midst of unleashing a Cultural Revolution that would temporarily destroy schools that taught western medicine, asked Zhou En Lai to establish a military research project on ...
