
Nobel Prize goes to modest woman who beat malaria for China - confiscate
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228382-000-the-modest-woman-who-beat-malaria-for-china/
======
dang
Url changed from [http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9461471/nobel-malaria-tu-
youyou](http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9461471/nobel-malaria-tu-youyou), which
points to this, which is actually from 2011 but has an update (and a headline,
of course) about the Nobel Prize.

There was also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213)
earlier today, which turns out to have been her 2011 paper, though few of us
seem to have recognized it.

Edit: there's also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856).

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guybrushT
I hope this prize leads to a more systematic (re)look at traditional medicine
- both Chinese and Indian. It would be important (and exciting) to understand
what thousands of years of 'wisdom' can offer modern science and the drug
industry.

Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine?
Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?

~~~
db48x
There already is; it's called organic chemistry. Completely synthetic
medicines are a relatively new thing; for hundreds of years chemists have
tested everything they could get their hands on for everything they could
think of. Even so, novel natural products are discovered every year, and new
uses for them likewise. Even those are usually synthesized, however, for cost
reasons. If you find something interesting by grinding up sea sponges or
something then you'd better hope you can synthesize it, or you'll never have
enough to be useful. Also, if you can synthesize it then you can try a bunch
of different modifications to it, and possibly find something similar which
works even better. Evolution gives you random scatter-shot of chemicals; it's
as likely to miss a really good one as it is to find it. (Plus the sea sponges
and algae and so on are all optimizing for their own survival, not
biocompatibility with humans.)

The only difference between medicine and "traditional" medicine is that
"traditional" medicines are never discarded once they're proven to be
ineffective.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
The cool thing about the modern way of approaching natural products is that
it's reaching far beyond what traditional herbal medicine is able to. Case in
point, I heard of a promising new antibiotic that originated from a soil
bacterium found in a random grassy field in the US somewhere. The latest
edition of Foreign Policy has a good piece on these things.

~~~
mrob
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin)

The origin of that antibiotic is notable for the new method of culturing the
soil bacteria in situ, but antibiotics from soil bacteria are not new. Most
antibiotics with a name ending in "mycin" were isolated from soil bacteria.

------
mc32
There are some who say there were more deserving members on that team who
didn't get recognition. In other words, it was a team effort and there were
others whose work figured more into the discovery but who didn't get
recognized.

Who knows, its possible the objectors are being political, or biased, but some
people contest her getting all the recognition when there was a team with
other prominent researchers, and that's unfortunate.

~~~
dagw
_There are some who say there were more deserving members on that team who
didn 't get recognition._

This seems to be the standard call for every science prize these days. I
wonder if the Nobel committee will ever change their rules so they can start
giving prizes to teams rather than 2-3 individuals.

~~~
jessriedel
That defeats the purpose of the prize, which is to inspire individuals (among
other things). Fairness per se isn't the point.

Why not give the prize to a whole university, since the researchers couldn't
do it without the admin staff and the students? Or to the whole country of
taxpayers?

~~~
rawTruthHurts
Because that would be wonderful. And we don't want things to be wonderful,
right?

~~~
kbutler
The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to organizations:
[http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.h...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.html)

Awarding the prize in chemistry or physics or medicine to a country seems like
it would dilute the award beyond recognition.

~~~
rawTruthHurts
I'm sure you appreciated the sarcasm anyways. Thanks for the link.

------
borski
I usually balk at herbal cures, but it's actually a really dumb thing for me
to do, eh? Perhaps it's just the egoist in me that wants to think there's
nothing nature or a random plant can figure out or has figured out, that we
can't figure out synthetically in the lab.

I should probably stop - there is something to be said for herbal cures,
meditation, etc., I think.

~~~
esturk
People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree
they are correct. But just because no one has published a paper with a
controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work. Some of them does work
because of trial and error.

Consider how the original discovery of a poison is made the hard way. It's
morbid to think, but someone probably died to figure out that some plants are
poisonous. Now extend that to thousands of herbs that may treat pain such as
weed or may treat gout. Its not an efficient process but there was an observer
that recorded the data when someone took a herb. That observer may not have
recorded the data but s/he may spread it by word. This is sort of like an
expert that gives small weights to its neighbors in a training group. So over
time and through many iterations (sort of like a training group that iterates
through many cycles), some final accumulated "common truth" is collected. That
is analogous to a fuzzy logic or probability in whether a herbal medicine may
work.

But that's with only 1 herb. Even with just 1000 herbs, a 2 herb combination
is already half a million. You see how inefficient that is? Even with over
6000 years of human history, the trial and error is still very limited in drug
exploration. So just because theres no recorded data of the tests that it
doesn't mean it can't work.

~~~
Asbostos
Except we have no idea that traditional medicines were developed by effective
trial and error. It's more likely that some mystic just declared some
arbitrary potion to be medicine for some arbitrary disease and the placebo
effect, appeal to authority and the desperation of sick people did the rest of
the work popularizing them. The ancient Chinese used the positions of the
stars to help choose their medicines. This ineffectiveness is shown by the
fact that the traditional recipe Tu found actually involved destroying the
active ingredient by boiling it! Clearly the original authors didn't know if
it worked or not, since it didn't but they still recommended it to patients
anyway.

Today in China, almost everyone still uses traditional medicines. It's a
massive national problem. They use them for minor diseases like colds and
coughs and continue to believe they're effective because "I took the medicine
and a few days later I recovered". The medicine companies are ripping off
uneducated poor people and the "medicine" doesn't deserve any respect other
than as a source of compounds to test using actual science. The scam is
reinforced by doctors in hospitals who often prescribe a combination of
traditional and modern medicine so that the modern medicine does the work
while the (sometimes more expensive) traditional medicine leaves an
opportunity for the patient to credit it instead.

~~~
powerapple
if you read the article, the extract from the traditional recipe says to
squeeze and drink with water. It doesn't need a boiling process.

~~~
Asbostos
Oh yes. I misread it. Doesn't change the point though that traditional
medicine is about as good as homeopathy or praying.

