Artemisinin and Chinese Medicine as Tu Science Jia-Chen Fu Emory University, United States The story of discovery of artemisinin highlights the diversity of scientific values across time and space. Resituating artemisinin research within a broader temporal framework allows us to understand how Chi- nese drugs like qinghao came to articulate a space for scientific experimentation and innovation through its embodiment of alternating clusters of meanings associ- ated with tu and yang within scientific discourse. Tu science, which was associated with terms like native, Chinese, local, rustic, mass, and crude, articulated a radical vision of science in the service of socialist revo- lutionary ideals. Yang science, which signified foreign, Western, elite, and professional, tended to bear the hall- marks of professionalism, transnational networks in education and training, and an emphasis on basic or foundational research. With respect to medical research, the case of artemisinin highlights how the constitution of socialist science as an interplay of tu and yang engen- dered different scientific values and parameters for scientific endeavor. Modern medical research in Maoist China could harness the productive energies of mass participation to technical expertise in its investigations of Chinese drugs, and under the banner of tu science, it became possible and scientifically legitimate to research Chinese drugs in ways that had previously provoked resistance and controversy. Introduction The discovery of artemisinin has been presented as a tale resplendent with ingenuity in the face of adversity, social commitment to the good of humanity, genuine esteem for past wisdom, and a heartfelt belief in the value of science. Known in Chinese as qinghaosu ( ) and derived from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua L.), artemisinin is the active chemical substance extracted from the Chinese herb qinghao ( ). That it should be discovered by a young female medical chemist against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the Vietnam War, as part of a military-supported anti-malarial campaign called Project 523, only accentuates the sense of wonder accompanying the discovery. According to Tu Youyou (1930–), who received a Nobel Prize for the discovery of artemisinin in 2015 and has become the face associated with the achievement, it happened as follows: On the basis of collection and analysis of traditional prescriptions, my research group screened over two hundred herbs and three hundred and eighty extracts from them using malarial models of mouse or monkey. I was enlightened by the description, “a handful of qinghao immersed with 2 liters of water, get juice and drink it” (Ge Hong, 1956). The antima- larial effect of qinghao was gradually cleared up when temperature, enzymolysis, solvents, species, portions, and collecting season of the herb were systematically considered. A new antimalarial was developed in 1971, based on scientific analysis of antimalarial nature of Qinghao with its history of over one thousand years. The new drug won the national award of invention, and brings benefit to the people of the world. 1 Tu’s description has become the standard account for the discovery of artemisinin. Her receipt of both the Lasker–DeBakey Award for Clinical Medical Research in 2011 and the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 has reaffirmed this account, within which several details have been repeated with varying degrees of flourish in all subsequent accounts: the longevity and integrity of traditional Chinese medicine; the integration of tradi- tional medical knowledge with that of biomedicine; and the unassuming power of a single insight in the produc- tion of scientific knowledge. As a story we can now tell about the advancement of science, Tu Youyou’s discovery of artemisinin has been molded into the shape of any other story within the medical canon—stories like John Snow’s identification of the Broad Street pump as the source of an 1854 cholera outbreak or Ignaz Semmel- weis’s observation that washing one’s hands with anti- septic after working with cadavers and before delivering a child significantly reduced the likelihood of maternal death. But what does the story of Tu’s discovery tell us about Chinese science in both its socialist and reform era iterations? It may be surprising for an English-speaking Endeavour Vol. 41 No.3 Corresponding author: Fu, J.-C. (jia-chen.fu@emory.edu). Keywords: Chinese medicine; Biomedicine; Malaria; Artemisinin; Cultural Revolu- tion; Scientific values; Medical research; China. Available online 8 July 2017 1 Tu Youyou, “The Development of the Antimalarial Drugs with New Type of Chemical Structure – Qinghaosu and Dihydroqinghaosu,” Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 35, no. 2 (June 2004): 250–51, on 250. Full text provided by www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/ß 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.06.005