The Top Secret Chinese Military Project That Led To a Nobel Prize 73
HughPickens.com writes: Jeff Guo reports at the Washington Post that development of qinghaosu — or artemisinin — is one of modern China's proudest accomplishments winning a Noble Prize in Medicine this year for Tu Youyou, but it's also a story about Communism, Chairman Mao, and China's return to the world economy. On May 23, 1967, Chinese scientists commenced Project 523, a secret effort that enlisted hundreds of researchers to discover a new malaria drug during the Vietnam War. Although in a better warfare position, the People's Army of Vietnam (North Vietnamese Army) and its allies in the South, Viet Cong, suffered increasing mortality because of malaria epidemics. The project began at the height of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, a brutal time during which academics and intellectuals were murdered, imprisoned, or sent to "reeducation camps" in mass purges.
For doctors and chemists. Project 523 was a lifeline, according to Professor Zhou Yiqing. "By the time Project 523 had got under way, the Cultural Revolution had started and the research provided shelter for scientists facing political persecution." Tu's husband had been banished to the countryside when she was asked to get involved in Project 523. Tu's research project sought to find modern logic in ancient ways, much as the French researchers identified quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree. According to Tu, she and her team screened over 2,000 different Chinese herbs described in old texts, of which about 200 were good enough to test in mice. That's when they hit upon a plant called Artemisia annua: annual wormwood, or qinghao in Chinese. At the time, all of this work remained a Chinese military secret; some of the results were published in Chinese-language journals, but it would be well after the death of Mao Zedong until China would reveal that it had discovered a surprisingly potent new weapon against malaria.
According to Guo the lion's share of the credit rightly goes to Tu and the countless other Chinese scientists who worked on Project 523. But Oxford anthropologist Elisabeth Hsu suggests that the political climate at the time also deserves recognition. Qinghaosu might never have been discovered had it not been for Maoist China's nationalist infatuation with Chinese folk medicine. "It was thus a feature specific to institutions of the People's Republic of China that scientists, who themselves had learnt ways of appreciating traditional knowledge, worked side by side with historians of traditional medicine, who had textual learning," Hsu argues. "This was crucial for the 'discovery' of qinghao."
For doctors and chemists. Project 523 was a lifeline, according to Professor Zhou Yiqing. "By the time Project 523 had got under way, the Cultural Revolution had started and the research provided shelter for scientists facing political persecution." Tu's husband had been banished to the countryside when she was asked to get involved in Project 523. Tu's research project sought to find modern logic in ancient ways, much as the French researchers identified quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree. According to Tu, she and her team screened over 2,000 different Chinese herbs described in old texts, of which about 200 were good enough to test in mice. That's when they hit upon a plant called Artemisia annua: annual wormwood, or qinghao in Chinese. At the time, all of this work remained a Chinese military secret; some of the results were published in Chinese-language journals, but it would be well after the death of Mao Zedong until China would reveal that it had discovered a surprisingly potent new weapon against malaria.
According to Guo the lion's share of the credit rightly goes to Tu and the countless other Chinese scientists who worked on Project 523. But Oxford anthropologist Elisabeth Hsu suggests that the political climate at the time also deserves recognition. Qinghaosu might never have been discovered had it not been for Maoist China's nationalist infatuation with Chinese folk medicine. "It was thus a feature specific to institutions of the People's Republic of China that scientists, who themselves had learnt ways of appreciating traditional knowledge, worked side by side with historians of traditional medicine, who had textual learning," Hsu argues. "This was crucial for the 'discovery' of qinghao."
Yes, but ... (Score:3)
Experiment 626 is what we are really anxious to hear about.
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Experiment 626 is what we are really anxious to hear about.
Dude, you've been back into the Experiment 420 again, haven't you.
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They didn't suck up to Chia during this period. The goal is freedom in these countries, and China has a great deal of economic freedom for its people now, even if speech is curtailed.
As the West is seeing (again and again, unfortunately, never learning the lesson) there is a lot more to freedom than just speech. It certainly seems to play only a small part at best in the increasing health and wealth of a nation, brought about by economic freedom for its citizens.
Ironically, if we want to crush them, we sh
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The goal is freedom in these countries, and China has a great deal of economic freedom for its people now, even if speech is curtailed. . . if we want to crush them, we should encourage massive regulation and redistribution of wealth until they are of little consequence on the world stage, like Europe
Interesting comparison, because for the vast majority of Chinese citizens, while their economic freedom (and condition) is infinitely better than under Mao, it's still much less than in Europe unless you're ver
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Why propels some Westerners to perpetuate this kind of bullshit indefinitely?
I am from China. I ran away from China during the height of Cultural Revolution and ended in America as a refugee
Now the businesses which I run include businesses in China - unlike the author of the above comment, I know what I am talking about
Have you talked to the Romani people (or so called Gypsies) in Europe?
Can you please elucidate how much 'economic freedom' the Romani people get to enjoy, in Europe , vis-a-vis the Chinese i
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I might be an American, almost a proud American though I'm more proud of what we could be than what we are - so not that proud really, but I have to wager on Putin. I'll even give you 10:8 odds and take all comers. I mean, dude, it's Putin... So long as everyone else stays out of the ring, I'm assuming he'll grind Obama into little bits starting with working on the body in the first round and then concentrating on taking out one side or the other in the middle rounds, and finally going back to the body to f
Re:Best weapon against malaria: DDT (Score:5, Interesting)
I have some actual knowledge about this issue from projects I've worked on.
DDT is excellent in domestic applications (i.e., to house interiors) because it leaves a long-lasting toxic surface when sprayed on walls. Other pesticides such as permethrin are more expensive to use because you have to go back and spray the surfaces of the house several times a year, whereas a DDT application is good for a year or more. This kind of domestic application is especially effective at stopping malaria transmission because the infectious agent (Plasmodium) has no natural focus other than humans.
In fogging applications the impact of the DDT ban is nil; in fact using DDT this way is arguably counter-productive, not even counting downstream ecological effects. The reason DDT is bad for outside applications is the very same reason it's good for interior applications: the durability of the molecule -- or more precisely its breakdown products. DDT is not much more long-lived than malathion or permethrin, it's half-life is about 50 days; but it breaks down through loss of HCl into Dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE) which has a half-life of almost six years and does a lot of DDT's residual killing.
Why is long lasting toxicity good for inside pesticide applications and bad for outside applications? Because outside the pesticide doesn't stay put. It washes away into soil and pools of water -- where mosquitoes lay their eggs. Bathing the larvae in sub-lethal concentrations of DDE puts evolutionary pressure on the mosquito population, producing adult mosquitoes who are resistant to DDT. You never want to expose mosquito larvae to pesticides which are used against adults. So for outside fogging applications you want something that'll kill mosquitoes the fog contacts, then breaks down as quickly as possible into something that's non-toxic.
Before you advocate something like the widespread reintroduction of DDT, it would be best if you educated yourself on its effects, methods of application, and side effects. There's a lot of misinformation out there to the effect that DDT is a panacea; it's not. For example I've seen one old toxicology study that is frequently cited by anti-environmentalists as proof DDT doesn't have toxic effects on birds. The flaw with that study, and the reason that they don't have more recent studies to cite, is that question of DDT per se in the environment is moot; it doesn't last long enough to bioaccumulate. It's actually the very long-lasting DDD and DDE breakdown products that are the culprits.
It would be reasonable to reintroduce DDT for domestic applications, provided that we can structure its use so that the effectiveness of the program isn't undermined by DDT that has been stolen and diverted to agricultural use. I can tell you from experience that theft is an enormous problem for teams operating in places that have serious endemic malaria problems.
So it really comes down to this: is the lower cost of DDT offset by the security and audit trail you need to ensure the program's long viability? Either way there's no reason to not eradicate malaria, and we don't need DDT to do it. The cost of eradication is tiny compared to the cost malaria has in economic output, lives shortened, and political destabilization.
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No it isn't, if the outcomes remains an additional 500,000 deaths a year in spite of his words.
Those are meme attempts to assuage the mass murderous effect of this ban.
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Those are meme attempts to assuage the mass murderous effect of this ban.
The idea that the DDT ban had "mass murderous effects" is itself a meme, and a very recent one, propagated for the specific purpose of discrediting the wider environmental movement and regulations on pollutants. And as the GP made clear, there are very serious practical concerns that are completely ignored by the shills clamoring for widespread DDT use (few of whom had ever expressed concern for the fate of Third World inhabitants unt
Let's get this straight: there's NO global ban. (Score:4, Informative)
See my other post on this; under the Stockholm convention DDT is allowed in the control of vector borne diseases and in fact the world uses some five million kilos of the stuff annually on mosquitoes. The reason more isn't used is the places where it would be most useful don't have the money to buy the stuff, cheap as it is. That's what you should be getting in a huff over, not some non-existent ban.
The places that do have bans (like the US and the EU) can afford better solutions.
Great insight (Score:2)
I agree - great post.
Please continue reading and posting - you are an asset to Slashdot.
An open letter to Slashdot.org (Score:1)
I have been a longtime follower of Slashdot and have been posting much as any Slashdotter would, endured both good and bad April Fools' columns, gritted my teeth and clawed my nails through beta, resisted the urge to like it on Facebook, and completely ignored mobile. I guess I am the most loyal follower then. Now, I am challenging the editors.
Here we have a guy who posed the challenge in the form of a question is the lower cost of DDT offset by the security and audit trail you need to ensure the program's
Re:Best weapon against malaria: DDT (Score:5, Interesting)
I should also point out the problem with your graph, which shows an increase in malaria deaths starting around 1972, when the US banned DDT. The problem is that DDT was not banned in the rest of the world in 1972. In fact it has continued to be used in the rest of the world, often with funding from USAID. About five million kilograms of DDT are still used every year worldwide, the bulk of it in India.
The current international status of DDT is that it is banned in signatory countries to the Stockholm convention for all purposes except mosquito borne disease control. This ban is actually beneficial for DDT in malaria eradication, because it reduces the populations of mosquitoes that have become resistant due to agricultural applications. DDT is fully banned in most first-world countries, but they don't need it. They have the resources and sophistication to control malaria vectors with IPM.
So if DDT is legal to use in places that have endemic malaria, why haven't we used DDT to eradicate malaria worldwide? There are several reasons, but the big one is that we haven't made any serious attempt yet to eradicate malaria worldwide with DDT or any other pesticide. People have talked about it, people have advocated for it, but nobody's ponied up the billions of dollars it would take to actually put a program together that could do it.
Funding clearly is the limiting factor in DDT use; most of the countries using DDT today are in subsaharan Africa, but the quantities involved are tiny, sporadic, or both; often amounting to a thousand kilos every couple of years.
"feature specific to institutions of .. China" (Score:2)
Seriously? In the same summary that describes how the French found quinine from cinchona? In a world where scientists developed aspirin because of people's use of plants for thousands of years? This is hardly unique to China.
Spoils of War (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems like we are at our industrious best when working in concert during a time of great conflict.
Sadly, times of contentment and peace are seemingly less productive. Do we require strife to excel?
Re: Spoils of War (Score:1)
It would appear so. It's my personal belief that we wouldn't be anywhere near as far along as we are right now if it hadn't have been for Hitler, Japanese foolish enough to bomb Americans at Pearl Harbor and WW2 in its entirety.
It was a massive push that changed everything in so many ways. It's scary. It's irony to the max. But it is what it is.
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I seem to recall that even Yamamoto (spelling?) declared it as a foolish idea - something about wakening the sleeping giant. They should have secured more oil resources first and, perhaps, finished off Australia as well. Getting the carriers would have been good, as well.
Either way, it was kind of brilliant in some regards and it did a huge amount of damage. The US was pretty industrious at that time and was able to overcome the damage in fairly short order. I doubt we could be so universally motivated agai
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It seems like we are at our industrious best when working in concert during a time of great conflict.
Working in concert can indeed produce great things quite fast. War is not required (e.g. the Apollo program), but in our typically competitive and anarchistic cultures, the people with money to invest prefer personal profit to the common good, so sharing and working in concert does not apply to the competition. The government can step in and enforce cooperation, which sometimes happen during a war economy, but it also means limiting the rights of the rich and powerful, sometimes with a big, fat lump of cash
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War is not required (e.g. the Apollo program)
Cold War.
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The science historian James Burke [wikipedia.org] once remarked something like historically, the only good things science is for is making money and making war. Even the internet came directly out of war related projects.
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Do we require strife to excel?
No, far from it. The existence of pressing problems puts an emphasis on finding solutions, obviously, but finding a solution is only possible because enough research, often basic research, has taken place for years or decades of peace before, when the conditions favoured it. Most of the scientific development in the West was only made possible because a number of eminient scientists had the opportunity to think deeply about idle, philosophical curiosities some time in the middle of last millennium - idle cu
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It could be safely stated that defying convention is still potentially dangerous, even in this more enlightened time.
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My humble attempt:
Strife yields Man's best.
Peace is not as bountiful.
What is excellence?
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Barefoot Doctors (Score:1)
Somebody has to say it, since it's being overlooked in the summary. This project is an outspringing from the Cultural Revolution's 'Barefoot Doctor' movement. [wikipedia.org]
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So she "discovers" something that was widely known for, what, 500 years? and she gets a nobel? WTF is this about?
It's about eliminating the other 1,999 herbs that were also "known" about. It's about applying the herb that had been traditionally used to treat generic fevers to now fight malaria. It's about isolating the compound in the herb (Artemisinin) and figuring the best way to extract it (which wasn't the method traditionally used).
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In short, it's about RTFA, a.
When's her birthday? (Score:4, Funny)
Deserved! (Score:3)
I was truly happy when I heard that the Nobel prize had been awarded for the discovery and development of artemisinin. This drug has saved the lives of many.
Sad that substandard preparations of artemisinin has led to spread of resistance in Indochina.
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virve
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As opposed to Western medicine, where an effective drug has reached the perfect price point as set by lawyers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and market droids. That it can heal is a side effect.
Burden of proof. (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFS: "According to Tu, she and her team screened over 2,000 different Chinese herbs described in old texts, of which about 200 were good enough to test in mice. That's when they hit upon a plant called Artemisia annua: annual wormwood, or qinghao in Chinese."
Yeah, I've already heard from from my crunchy greenie friends about how this "proves" the value of traditional medicine. That one text mentions on herb that worked, and 1,999 texts listed herbs that didn't shows the exact opposite... completely escapes them.
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Exactly. A 99.95% failure rate is -- to say the least -- Bad.
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Of the advances in drug testing in recent years, one is a technique to test a hundred or so substances at once. Until computational methods allow prediction of what chemicals will cure what disease, scattershot procedures are necessary. Considering that hundreds of Chinese researchers took many years to screen only 2000 things, that's not a very efficient record.
Of course, it's valid to ask if this drug's 1 in 2000 discovery is better than what would have resulted in testing thousands of plants completely a
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assuming that everything old was written by fools or charlatans seems like an error.
I don't assume that *everything* old was written by fools or charlatans. After all, it's from where we derived morphine, acetylsalicylic acid and chloroquine.
But for every effective traditional medicine, there were hundreds of "medicines" like rhino horn for limp dick, homeopathy, mercury injections for syphilis an cocaine and opium patent medicines for... just about everything.
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>Exactly. A 99.95% failure rate is -- to say the least -- Bad.
1) When Western pharmaceutical companies are doing a screen, how many of those chemicals turn out not to work on malaria?
2) Where do pharmaceutical companies look when they're screening new chemicals?
3) How many of the TCM drugs were effective against malaria, just not "wonder drug" effective?
4) How many of the TCM drugs screened were effective at other diseases?
Until you can answer those questions, you cannot make that conclusion.
I've done co
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1) When Western pharmaceutical companies are doing a screen, how many of those chemicals turn out not to work on malaria?
Since those chemicals aren't published as being cures, the comparison to TCM is wholly invalid.
3) How many of the TCM drugs were effective against malaria, just not "wonder drug" effective?
That's a good question.
have read through UCSF's "alt med bible" detailing all the thousands of studies on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of various alt med drugs.
And???? How many were effective?
(I'm betting that it's Very Few, since "alt med" that is proven successful isn't "alt med" anymore.)
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>(I'm betting that it's Very Few, since "alt med" that is proven successful isn't "alt med" anymore.)
While I acknowledge the meme, alt med is actually defined by every major medical organization in the world as something that is not used as part of mainstream medicine. It's not an assessment of effectiveness.
Quite a bit of the drugs in the alt med bible were wholly ineffective, and quite a few more had weak or modest medicinal purposes (tea alone had hundreds of studies showing its mild effectiveness in
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Yeah, I've already heard from from my crunchy greenie friends about how this "proves" the value of traditional medicine. That one text mentions on herb that worked, and 1,999 texts listed herbs that didn't shows the exact opposite... completely escapes them.
To be fair, those traditional herbal medicines were not all supposed to be malaria cures specifically. In fact this particular herb was a general cure for fever.
From Artemisinin: Discovery from the Chinese Herbal Garden [nih.gov]:
During their search, Youyou Tu and colleagues investigated more than 2,000 recipes of Chinese traditional herbs, compiling 640 recipes that might have some antimalarial activity.
Of course, traditional techniques for extracting the compound to make the medicine were still wrong though, so y
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200 out of 2000 is a 10% success rate
If by "success" you mean "good enough to test on mice". How many were good enough to test on humans?
Given that they found one out of the 200 that was better than the state of the art, I'd say score one for applying the scientific method to traditional medicine.
The state of the art (chloroquine) was derived from a traditional medicine.
The manifest problem with "traditional medicine" isn't that none of them work, but that so damned few work, and yet fools still run around saying how all traditional is soooo great.
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200 out of 2000 is a 10% success rate
If by "success" you mean "good enough to test on mice". How many were good enough to test on humans?
Good point. TFA does not specify how their screening process worked, though. TFA also does not specify how many actually helped against malaria, just that one was really good, nor does it say anything about testing the herbs against other ailments.
The manifest problem with "traditional medicine" isn't that none of them work, but that so damned few work, and yet fools still run around saying how all traditional is soooo great.
It is my impression that many practitioners of traditional medicine actively refuses to let their methods be subject to clinical tests, so we have no empirical data to estimate the ability of the treatment to heal a given ailment or its side effects. Mighty suspic
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Mighty suspicious.
More than that. It's them admitting that they're frauds.
Check your math. (Score:2)
They tested 200 out of 2000 - but only one worked. Thus the proper number is 1 of 2000 - a success rate of .05%, not 10%.
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Malaria was the target (Score:2)
The criteria was "successful against malaria" - so their value in treating other conditions is irrelevant to determining the success rate against malaria. Either they meet the criteria, or they don't.
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I'm an acupuncturist and herbalist in the U.S. All chinese herbalists are trained with knowledge of qing hao, which has been known for a couple thousand years as an herb that can be used in the treatment of many tropical diseases, including malaria. I have treated several people with sequelae of several tropical diseases contracted during scientific expeditions overseas, and have seen the effectiveness of herbs in treatment.
I believe that the scientists involved must not have consulted any actual chinese do
Rediscovery of absinthe (Score:1)
Artemisia, wormwood, absinthe.
All that is old is new again.
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Like any other commodity, experience can be purchased.