It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.
-Kujako-
Last edited by anntheman; 2015-10-08 at 04:49 PM.
Plus, unlike curing a headache with a special touch, or curing erectical disfunction with some magical rhino horn powder - curing Malaria is a lot less likely to be unrelated to the herbs you eat.
Malaria doesn't go away accidentally. So if an ancient text says, "Joe got malaria again today, but then we gave him sweet wormwood and he was better in time for the game this afternoon" - either you are mis-translating the word Malaria, or there is a pretty high likelihood that the wormwood treatment is curing it. That's the sort of thing that should set off alarm bells in your mind.
Further, lots of modern drugs come from traditional cures - it's very common to test naturopathic claims for their validity and accept/disregard them based on the findings. ex. Morphine was used by the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians - it's one of the oldest medicines on the planet. Ephedrine - found in most cough and cold medicine - is a ~4000 year old Chinese recipe too. Cortisone was traditionally extracted in Mexico from treating a local Yam variant - it's used in many modern joint and muscle pain treatments. Aspirin is Acetylsalicylic Acid - extracted from willow tree bark for at least 3000 years as a headache treatment.
So Herbalism is very valuable to modern medicine - the issue is when science explores a traditional remedy, dissects every compound from the substance and rigorously tests to confirm it has no effect - then 'traditional medicine' keeps making claims for substances that provably has no measurable effect.
If you look at it that way, then yes. The discovery itself (of artmemisinin), is an achievement. I think the OP's concern is the legitemacy of the award and for that one should consider that committee that awarded the prize. Personally, I have no qualms with a scientist not having degrees as long as his/her methods/track record is solid. But yeah, Nobel Prize commitee has awarded some arguable less credible people before. Much less credible then Youyou Tu.
All great success is an outlier.
I have worked hard in my own field and done pretty well, and I consider myself an outlier. My work has really nothing to do with my degree, and I run my own firm.
So yes, "attempting to be an outlier" is what it's all about.
That's a good way of putting it actually.