@Julian Dalrimple-sikes
In 2015, Tu Youyou became the first mainland Chinese scientist to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Her discovery ? A compound extracted from a common garden plant that had been documented in Chinese medical texts since 340 AD. This plant, Artemisia annua (sweet wormwood), kills malaria parasites faster than any drug in history and has saved millions of lives across Africa. Yet today, the World Health Organization explicitly discourages using the plant itself, insisting you must buy the extracted pharmaceutical version instead.
This is the story of wormwood, a plant that emperors reserved for themselves, soldiers carried into battle, and modern science validated with the world’s highest honor. It’s also the story of how a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry has worked to suppress knowledge of the whole plant while monopolizing its extracted compounds.