Tu Youyou, a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist working during the Cultural Revolution, discovered artemisinin as an antimalarial drug derived from the sweet wormwood plant Artemisia annua in 1971, drawing on traditional Chinese medical texts that had recorded the plant's fever-reducing properties. Artemisinin and its derivatives became the world's most effective malaria treatments, replacing quinine-derived drugs that had lost efficacy as the Plasmodium parasite developed resistance. Tu Youyou received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.

Tu Youyou's discovery — rooted in ancient Chinese medical texts and achieved by a woman scientist working in political isolation during the Cultural Revolution — became a story of extraordinary literary and cultural resonance. The fact that the solution to one of humanity's oldest mosquito-borne afflictions lay hidden in classical Chinese medicine gave the discovery a narrative arc connecting the ancient literary tradition of Chinese botanical texts to the most urgent contemporary medical need. Tu's Nobel Prize brought this story to global attention and connected the long Chinese tradition of writing about medicinal plants to the contemporary fight against the mosquito.