http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-china-blog-34451386
Nobel Prize winner Tu Youyou helped by ancient Chinese remedy
Tu Youyou has become the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize, for her work in helping to create an anti-malaria medicine. The 84-year-old's route to the honour has been anything but traditional.
She won the Nobel Prize for medicine, but she doesn't have a medical degree or a PhD
Tu Youyou attended a pharmacology school in Beijing. Shortly after, she became a researcher at the Academy of Chinese Traditional Medicine.
In China, she is being called the "three noes" winner: no medical degree, no doctorate, and she's never worked overseas.
She started her malaria research after she was recruited to a top-secret government unit known as "Mission 523"
In 1967, Communist leader Mao Zedong decided there was an urgent national need to find a cure for malaria.
Two years later, Tu Youyou was instructed to become the new head of Mission 523. She was dispatched to the southern Chinese island of Hainan to study how malaria threatened human health.
For six months, she stayed there, leaving her four-year-old daughter at a local nursery.
Ms Tu's husband had been sent away to work at the countryside at the height of China's Cultural Revolution, a time of extreme political upheaval.
Ancient Chinese texts inspired Tu Youyou's search for her Nobel-prize winning medicine
Finally, the team found a brief reference to one substance, sweet wormwood, which had been used to treat malaria in China around 400 AD.
The team then tested extracts of the compound but nothing was effective in eradicating the drug until Tu Youyou returned to the original ancient text.
After another careful reading, she tweaked the drug recipe one final time, heating the extract without allowing it to reach boiling point.