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Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded to Scientist Tu Youyou for Breakthrough in Malaria Treatment During Cultural Revolution... and Why It Matters

October 19, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From a reader working with students on Rise Up October:

The Nobel Prize in medicine for 2015 was shared by three scientists, William Campbell of Ireland, Satoshi Omura of Japan, and Tu Youyou of China, for their contributions to developing treatments for parasitical infections and malaria, which kill millions of people, mostly among the poorest, in Third World countries.

Tu Youyou was awarded for developing an unconventional but extremely effective treatment for malaria that has saved millions of lives. She did it as part of a team called together by Chairman Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution in China, to aid the North Vietnamese army, fighting against U.S. imperialism in the Vietnam War, when it was being decimated by malaria, and many people in South China were dying from it as well. The discovery came at a time when malaria had become resistant to more commonly used drugs like chloroquine and deaths were surging.

Tu was not a degreed MD or PhD, but was part of the Chinese Academy of Traditional Medicine which studied traditional, mainly herbal, Chinese medicine. She had been part of a battle, led by Chairman Mao, to wipe out a parasite that caused the disease schistosomiasis, which killed millions in pre-revolutionary China.

She and her team searched through more than 2,000 ancient Chinese texts for clues on how to fight malaria. One recipe, written 1,600 years ago and entitled “Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One’s Sleeve,” described how sweet wormwood, or Artemisia annua, a plant, should be prepared in water to treat what were described as intermittent fevers, a symptom of malaria. Early trials of the plant worked at times, but not others. Tu found that boiling destroyed the active ingredient in Artemisia, but when she found a way to boil it at lower temperatures, it was 100 percent effective in tests on monkeys and mice.

When the plant had to be tested on humans for toxicity, Tu tested it on herself (this was a common practice during the Cultural Revolution). She has said in interviews that because the disease was killing so many, she felt a responsibility to do so. The drug went on to save millions of lives.

Tu’s team was part of a revolution in health care in China led by Mao that accomplished what the U.S. has never done: it established a system of universal health care. Health services were provided free or at low cost, with a health system guided by principles of cooperation and egalitarianism. Revolutionary China integrated Western and traditional medicine; for example, not only the use of traditional herbs, but wide-scale use of acupuncture, including as anesthesia in operations. This policy, championed by Mao, was called “walking on two legs,” utilizing the best of Western and Chinese traditional medicine. Some 1.3 million peasants were trained as health care providers (“barefoot doctors”) to meet basic health needs in the countryside, where the peasants and other poor people had never had access to quality health care. Life expectancy in China doubled from 32 years in 1949 to 65 years in 1976.

Barefoot doctors were one of the “socialist new things’’ created during the Cultural Revolution. Young people were chosen to receive medical training not because of their grades or their family’s wealth, but because of their dedication to serving the people. They were called “barefoot doctors’’ because they lived and worked among the common people, including working barefoot in the fields.

The barefoot doctors became an inspiration and role model to medical people all over the world, including for the “free clinic” movement that developed in the U.S. as part of the struggles of the 1960s.

With the capitalist coup in China after Mao’s death in 1976 and the reversal of the revolution, the barefoot doctors program was disbanded and the poor in China are again dying because of lack of affordable health care. China’s health care system today is so elitist they wouldn’t let Tu Youyou into the Academy of Sciences, and much of the scientific establishment ridiculed her for not having a PhD.

But it is important, especially for the younger generation today, to know that the way things are today, including millions of children dying by age five from hunger and preventable disease, as well as crimes against humanity like thousands killed by police in the U.S., DON’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! Compare the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or “Obamacare,” which is turning huge profits for the capitalists who invest in insurance companies, hospitals, and the drug industry, while tens of millions of people still have no access to health care and thousands die each year of curable conditions, or are forced into crushing debt or homelessness through lack of insurance, to the sweeping achievements in health care in revolutionary China, and you see why we don’t need to try to put band aids on this system, we need a revolution and a whole new system: socialism on the way to communism, as envisioned in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal), based on Bob Avakian’s new synthesis.

I write this especially for the students I work with, who have never lived on Earth when there were genuine socialist revolutions, and have grown up in a time of endless slanders of socialism and communism, which has led to all kinds of cynicism, relativism, rampant individualism, and other outlooks that prevent people seeing the potential for, much less fighting for, a whole different and better world.

Even, or especially when, we’re fighting intense battles, like today’s to stop mass incarceration and police terror, we must keep our sights set on revolution and the liberation of the whole world. As Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party has said:

Don’t let people tell you we can’t do better than this… don’t let anybody tell you that America is eternal, and that the best we can hope for is getting some itty-bitty changes in HOW they dog us. Don’t let them suck you into framing what you’re trying to do in the language and the terms of the system. Don’t let them tell you that we have to limit ourselves to working within the channels this system puts out there. We’ve seen this movie before, and the result is the whole genocidal situation we face right now—and yes, I said genocide. So I’m challenging everyone here, especially you young people—get into this revolution, get into Bob Avakian and what he’s brought forward about how to make revolution—keep your sights aimed where they need to be: on emancipating all of humanity.

 

 

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