Antiparasitic drugs
Pulled from a 1,600-year-old Chinese fever recipe, extracted cold because heat destroyed it, and now the backbone of malaria treatment.
Not yet investigated
Pulled from a 1,600-year-old Chinese fever recipe, extracted cold because heat destroyed it, and now the backbone of malaria treatment.
This star is on the map because the show intends to take the question apart properly — the trials, how it is actually tested, whether the thing sold is the thing studied. That work is not done yet, and nothing here should be read as a conclusion. When the investigation is published it will appear on this page.
What we are reading
Gathered for the investigation and not yet written up. Each note says what the paper does and does not show.
Her own account, four years before the Nobel. The detail that matters for this show: the classical text said to steep the herb in cold water and wring it out, and that instruction is why the extraction worked — artemisinin degrades with heat, so the conventional hot extraction had been destroying it. The tradition did not contain the pharmacology. It contained the method, and somebody had to notice.
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The letter
The full citation list for each investigation, the studies that didn't make the episode, and any corrections — sent the morning it publishes.
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