8 ms·

Nobel Prize goes to modest woman who beat malaria for China

130 points by confiscate 11y ago

guybrushT 11y ago
I hope this prize leads to a more systematic (re)look at traditional medicine - both Chinese and Indian. It would be important (and exciting) to understand what thousands of years of 'wisdom' can offer modern science and the drug industry. Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine? Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?
- vvilp 11y ago
  In China, at present, we have some institutes conducting the research of using modern scientific process to extract the essence of traditional plant. Hopefully some would show the true effect to the human beings
- db48x 11y ago
  There already is; it's called organic chemistry. Completely synthetic medicines are a relatively new thing; for hundreds of years chemists have tested everything they could get their hands on for everything they could think of. Even so, novel natural products are discovered every year, and new uses for them likewise. Even those are usually synthesized, however, for cost reasons. If you find something interesting by grinding up sea sponges or something then you'd better hope you can synthesize it, or you'll never have enough to be useful. Also, if you can synthesize it then you can try a bunch of different modifications to it, and possibly find something similar which works even better. Evolution gives you random scatter-shot of chemicals; it's as likely to miss a really good one as it is to find it. (Plus the sea sponges and algae and so on are all optimizing for their own survival, not biocompatibility with humans.) The only difference between medicine and "traditional" medicine is that "traditional" medicines are never discarded once they're proven to be ineffective.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    The cool thing about the modern way of approaching natural products is that it's reaching far beyond what traditional herbal medicine is able to. Case in point, I heard of a promising new antibiotic that originated from a soil bacterium found in a random grassy field in the US somewhere. The latest edition of Foreign Policy has a good piece on these things.
    - mrob 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin The origin of that antibiotic is notable for the new method of culturing the soil bacteria in situ, but antibiotics from soil bacteria are not new. Most antibiotics with a name ending in "mycin" were isolated from soil bacteria.
  - petra 11y ago
    In many cases , the right method to test medicinal properties of plants is to break them into their contituents and test each separately ? and you miss a lot by not doing so(although it is hard) ?
    - db48x 11y ago
      Yes. While most of the components of a plant will have no particular effect, the one component that you're looking for may be lost in the noise. Worse, it could be cancelled out by some other component or components. (Think of proteins which inactivate other proteins.)
- xenadu02 11y ago
  Other comments have covered this angle already; we do actively look at herbs, "traditional", and "plant-based" cures. The vast majority (99.9%+) do absolutely nothing. The tiny percentage that have some effectiveness are usually just starting points. In fact this woman's discovery is exactly that because the malaria parasite is already developing resistance to it which is why the recommended therapy combines it with other drugs to prevent a resistant strain from spreading. That doesn't belittle her accomplishment by any means, but if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones. Much like pyrethrin-based insecticides, this chemical is already being studied and modified in an attempt to discover variants that are easier to make, have fewer side effects, or which organisms can't develop resistance against quite as easily.
  - misnome 11y ago
    > if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones. I really like this analogy!
- jlg23 11y ago
  This is being done: India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Knowledge_Digital_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Knowledge_Digital_.... China: research into TCM happens a lot, even in Western laboratories Amazonian and African plants are cataloged and analyzed for the pharmacological properties. I cannot name specific research projects, but plenty of books from respectable sources can be found. When traveling the Amazon I even met some pharmacologists who scout for plants (all but one working for pharmaceutical companies). Unfortunately the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start and thus the hardest part for the interested amateur pharmacologist is filtering out all the pseudo-scientific publications in that field. It's not all bad, a lot is even useful as a starting point for serious research, but hard facts are hard to come by.
  - dalke 11y ago
    > the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start I don't think it's really meaningful to say that. To start with, what do you mean by "alternative healing movement"? The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s. But many of the practice and of course many of the inspirations are a lot older. On the other hand, ethnobotanists have been cataloging pharmacological properties for over a century. Indeed, this Nobel Prize is for similar research done in the 1960s, so to say 'a 20 or 30 year head-start' would be to say the alternative healing movement started doing this no later than the 1940s. The confounding problem is that herbalism is a much older practice, with a recorded history stretching back 1000s of years. When did the alternative healing movement not use herbalism? I don't know enough about the history to really clear things up, but I can point to the 1987 essay on various aspects of the traditional medicinal aspects of celery - http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v8p164y1985.pdf http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v8p164y1985.pdf - to show that it's hard to say that the modern alternative healing movement added anything new to the long and world-wide herbalist tradition.
    - jlg23 11y ago
      > The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s Yes, I am referring to the group(s) that applied that label to themselves, not to herbalists as a whole, but to groups that elevated wishful thinking and superstition to "facts". They always had cures for aids, cancer or you-name-it, based on "nobody of the natives who used the plant ever had it" (reality: were never diagnosed because they never saw a doctor). I am talking about the groups that give every scientific mind the creeps and that harmed traditional medicine by putting it into the esoteric corner. But as I said, even these groups added some value - if only by collecting hints at useful plants and their applications that can serve as a starting point for further (actual) research. My personal low was a Swiss "healer" who attributed the pain-killing effect of cloves to their shape - the discussion turned really nasty when I pointed her at Eugenol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenol). The personal highlight was the Moroccan herbalist in Fez, who knew the limits of what he can do, knew the pharmacology (to some degree) behind his plants and always could explain why they did things the way they did (and it's not "because tradition"...)
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  can we patent them? or is traditional going to be considered prior art? because I don't see big pharma jumping in without profit and with all the regulations around it it's going to be very hard to pay for all the tests for societies not part of the big entourage.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    Obamacare reimburses alternative medecines already so the harm is already done
- Gustomaximus 11y ago
  Ive heard of people who dedicate their studies to this. Also Ive an anthropologist friend who spent time living in a developing country studying how people culture blended their traditional vs modern medicine usage. IMO a real boon for medicine will be increasing sophisticated personal monitoring and the data this makes accessible to the world when shared. If sure we'll see some amazing cause/effect relationships from all sort of areas being identified in coming years .
borski 11y ago
I usually balk at herbal cures, but it's actually a really dumb thing for me to do, eh? Perhaps it's just the egoist in me that wants to think there's nothing nature or a random plant can figure out or has figured out, that we can't figure out synthetically in the lab. I should probably stop - there is something to be said for herbal cures, meditation, etc., I think.
- vvilp 11y ago
  Personally, I would think like this. Not matter it is herbal cures or chemical medicine, I only trust the one comes from the true scientific process like double blind tests. I wont say the traditional Chinese herbal medicine is absolutely crap as some of current wonderful medicine is the extraction of plant.
- Jedd 11y ago
  Well, just like modern/western/industrial pharmacology, traditional medicines range from Very Effective down to Actually Quite Bad For You ... and their efficacy and safety are heavily influenced by the preparation method, dosage, the subject's physiology, other medications (including food) being taken, and so on. So while it's not 'really dumb' to discount any traditional medicine because it wasn't made by a profit-driven multi-national corporation, it perhaps indicates some naivete regarding the provenance of many current 'modern' medicines. Some casual reading on digitalis, neem, cinchona, and willow bark may be enlightening -- most people on the planet, including you, have almost definitely used at least one of those (or, I'll concede, a synthesized version of the active chemicals taken from those plants). There's some great resources on the net that speak to the role of plants in modern medicine - apart from the story you just read - keep in mind how many $'s have been spent over the past hundred years trying to come up with a synthetic cure for malaria.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Perhaps it's just the egoist in me that wants to think there's nothing nature or a random plant can figure out or has figured out, that we can't figure out synthetically in the lab. It's the other way around - most of the drugs we have are reverse-engineered plants. But there's nothing nature can do that we can't do better once we know how it works. What we do is, we take from nature the parts that actually do the healing and refine them, and we throw away the irrelevant rest. The reason some old herbal cures may be worth looking for is that it's likely that there is yet another plant-based substance that we could turn into actual, much more powerful medicine.
dang 11y ago
Url changed from http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9461471/nobel-malaria-tu-youyou http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9461471/nobel-malaria-tu-youyou, which points to this, which is actually from 2011 but has an update (and a headline, of course) about the Nobel Prize. There was also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213 earlier today, which turns out to have been her 2011 paper, though few of us seem to have recognized it. Edit: there's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856.
mc32 11y ago
There are some who say there were more deserving members on that team who didn't get recognition. In other words, it was a team effort and there were others whose work figured more into the discovery but who didn't get recognized. Who knows, its possible the objectors are being political, or biased, but some people contest her getting all the recognition when there was a team with other prominent researchers, and that's unfortunate.
- dagw 11y ago
  There are some who say there were more deserving members on that team who didn't get recognition. This seems to be the standard call for every science prize these days. I wonder if the Nobel committee will ever change their rules so they can start giving prizes to teams rather than 2-3 individuals.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    That defeats the purpose of the prize, which is to inspire individuals (among other things). Fairness per se isn't the point. Why not give the prize to a whole university, since the researchers couldn't do it without the admin staff and the students? Or to the whole country of taxpayers?
    - rawTruthHurts 11y ago
      Because that would be wonderful. And we don't want things to be wonderful, right?
      - kbutler 11y ago
        The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to organizations: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.h... Awarding the prize in chemistry or physics or medicine to a country seems like it would dilute the award beyond recognition.
        11y ago

130 points by confiscate 11y ago

I hope this prize leads to a more systematic (re)look at traditional medicine - both Chinese and Indian. It would be important (and exciting) to understand what thousands of years of 'wisdom' can offer modern science and the drug industry. Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine? Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?

vvilp 11y ago
In China, at present, we have some institutes conducting the research of using modern scientific process to extract the essence of traditional plant. Hopefully some would show the true effect to the human beings
db48x 11y ago
There already is; it's called organic chemistry. Completely synthetic medicines are a relatively new thing; for hundreds of years chemists have tested everything they could get their hands on for everything they could think of. Even so, novel natural products are discovered every year, and new uses for them likewise. Even those are usually synthesized, however, for cost reasons. If you find something interesting by grinding up sea sponges or something then you'd better hope you can synthesize it, or you'll never have enough to be useful. Also, if you can synthesize it then you can try a bunch of different modifications to it, and possibly find something similar which works even better. Evolution gives you random scatter-shot of chemicals; it's as likely to miss a really good one as it is to find it. (Plus the sea sponges and algae and so on are all optimizing for their own survival, not biocompatibility with humans.) The only difference between medicine and "traditional" medicine is that "traditional" medicines are never discarded once they're proven to be ineffective.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  The cool thing about the modern way of approaching natural products is that it's reaching far beyond what traditional herbal medicine is able to. Case in point, I heard of a promising new antibiotic that originated from a soil bacterium found in a random grassy field in the US somewhere. The latest edition of Foreign Policy has a good piece on these things.
  - mrob 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin The origin of that antibiotic is notable for the new method of culturing the soil bacteria in situ, but antibiotics from soil bacteria are not new. Most antibiotics with a name ending in "mycin" were isolated from soil bacteria.
- petra 11y ago
  In many cases , the right method to test medicinal properties of plants is to break them into their contituents and test each separately ? and you miss a lot by not doing so(although it is hard) ?
  - db48x 11y ago
    Yes. While most of the components of a plant will have no particular effect, the one component that you're looking for may be lost in the noise. Worse, it could be cancelled out by some other component or components. (Think of proteins which inactivate other proteins.)
xenadu02 11y ago
Other comments have covered this angle already; we do actively look at herbs, "traditional", and "plant-based" cures. The vast majority (99.9%+) do absolutely nothing. The tiny percentage that have some effectiveness are usually just starting points. In fact this woman's discovery is exactly that because the malaria parasite is already developing resistance to it which is why the recommended therapy combines it with other drugs to prevent a resistant strain from spreading. That doesn't belittle her accomplishment by any means, but if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones. Much like pyrethrin-based insecticides, this chemical is already being studied and modified in an attempt to discover variants that are easier to make, have fewer side effects, or which organisms can't develop resistance against quite as easily.
- misnome 11y ago
  > if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones. I really like this analogy!
jlg23 11y ago
This is being done: India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Knowledge_Digital_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Knowledge_Digital_.... China: research into TCM happens a lot, even in Western laboratories Amazonian and African plants are cataloged and analyzed for the pharmacological properties. I cannot name specific research projects, but plenty of books from respectable sources can be found. When traveling the Amazon I even met some pharmacologists who scout for plants (all but one working for pharmaceutical companies). Unfortunately the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start and thus the hardest part for the interested amateur pharmacologist is filtering out all the pseudo-scientific publications in that field. It's not all bad, a lot is even useful as a starting point for serious research, but hard facts are hard to come by.
- dalke 11y ago
  > the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start I don't think it's really meaningful to say that. To start with, what do you mean by "alternative healing movement"? The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s. But many of the practice and of course many of the inspirations are a lot older. On the other hand, ethnobotanists have been cataloging pharmacological properties for over a century. Indeed, this Nobel Prize is for similar research done in the 1960s, so to say 'a 20 or 30 year head-start' would be to say the alternative healing movement started doing this no later than the 1940s. The confounding problem is that herbalism is a much older practice, with a recorded history stretching back 1000s of years. When did the alternative healing movement not use herbalism? I don't know enough about the history to really clear things up, but I can point to the 1987 essay on various aspects of the traditional medicinal aspects of celery - http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v8p164y1985.pdf http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v8p164y1985.pdf - to show that it's hard to say that the modern alternative healing movement added anything new to the long and world-wide herbalist tradition.
  - jlg23 11y ago
    > The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s Yes, I am referring to the group(s) that applied that label to themselves, not to herbalists as a whole, but to groups that elevated wishful thinking and superstition to "facts". They always had cures for aids, cancer or you-name-it, based on "nobody of the natives who used the plant ever had it" (reality: were never diagnosed because they never saw a doctor). I am talking about the groups that give every scientific mind the creeps and that harmed traditional medicine by putting it into the esoteric corner. But as I said, even these groups added some value - if only by collecting hints at useful plants and their applications that can serve as a starting point for further (actual) research. My personal low was a Swiss "healer" who attributed the pain-killing effect of cloves to their shape - the discussion turned really nasty when I pointed her at Eugenol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenol). The personal highlight was the Moroccan herbalist in Fez, who knew the limits of what he can do, knew the pharmacology (to some degree) behind his plants and always could explain why they did things the way they did (and it's not "because tradition"...)
LoSboccacc 11y ago
can we patent them? or is traditional going to be considered prior art? because I don't see big pharma jumping in without profit and with all the regulations around it it's going to be very hard to pay for all the tests for societies not part of the big entourage.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Obamacare reimburses alternative medecines already so the harm is already done
Gustomaximus 11y ago
Ive heard of people who dedicate their studies to this. Also Ive an anthropologist friend who spent time living in a developing country studying how people culture blended their traditional vs modern medicine usage. IMO a real boon for medicine will be increasing sophisticated personal monitoring and the data this makes accessible to the world when shared. If sure we'll see some amazing cause/effect relationships from all sort of areas being identified in coming years .

borski 11y ago

I usually balk at herbal cures, but it's actually a really dumb thing for me to do, eh? Perhaps it's just the egoist in me that wants to think there's nothing nature or a random plant can figure out or has figured out, that we can't figure out synthetically in the lab. I should probably stop - there is something to be said for herbal cures, meditation, etc., I think.

vvilp 11y ago
Personally, I would think like this. Not matter it is herbal cures or chemical medicine, I only trust the one comes from the true scientific process like double blind tests. I wont say the traditional Chinese herbal medicine is absolutely crap as some of current wonderful medicine is the extraction of plant.
Jedd 11y ago
Well, just like modern/western/industrial pharmacology, traditional medicines range from Very Effective down to Actually Quite Bad For You ... and their efficacy and safety are heavily influenced by the preparation method, dosage, the subject's physiology, other medications (including food) being taken, and so on. So while it's not 'really dumb' to discount any traditional medicine because it wasn't made by a profit-driven multi-national corporation, it perhaps indicates some naivete regarding the provenance of many current 'modern' medicines. Some casual reading on digitalis, neem, cinchona, and willow bark may be enlightening -- most people on the planet, including you, have almost definitely used at least one of those (or, I'll concede, a synthesized version of the active chemicals taken from those plants). There's some great resources on the net that speak to the role of plants in modern medicine - apart from the story you just read - keep in mind how many $'s have been spent over the past hundred years trying to come up with a synthetic cure for malaria.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Perhaps it's just the egoist in me that wants to think there's nothing nature or a random plant can figure out or has figured out, that we can't figure out synthetically in the lab. It's the other way around - most of the drugs we have are reverse-engineered plants. But there's nothing nature can do that we can't do better once we know how it works. What we do is, we take from nature the parts that actually do the healing and refine them, and we throw away the irrelevant rest. The reason some old herbal cures may be worth looking for is that it's likely that there is yet another plant-based substance that we could turn into actual, much more powerful medicine.

dang 11y ago

Url changed from http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9461471/nobel-malaria-tu-youyou http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9461471/nobel-malaria-tu-youyou, which points to this, which is actually from 2011 but has an update (and a headline, of course) about the Nobel Prize. There was also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213 earlier today, which turns out to have been her 2011 paper, though few of us seem to have recognized it. Edit: there's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856.

mc32 11y ago

There are some who say there were more deserving members on that team who didn't get recognition. In other words, it was a team effort and there were others whose work figured more into the discovery but who didn't get recognized. Who knows, its possible the objectors are being political, or biased, but some people contest her getting all the recognition when there was a team with other prominent researchers, and that's unfortunate.

dagw 11y ago
There are some who say there were more deserving members on that team who didn't get recognition. This seems to be the standard call for every science prize these days. I wonder if the Nobel committee will ever change their rules so they can start giving prizes to teams rather than 2-3 individuals.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  That defeats the purpose of the prize, which is to inspire individuals (among other things). Fairness per se isn't the point. Why not give the prize to a whole university, since the researchers couldn't do it without the admin staff and the students? Or to the whole country of taxpayers?
  - rawTruthHurts 11y ago
    Because that would be wonderful. And we don't want things to be wonderful, right?
    - kbutler 11y ago
      The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to organizations: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.h... Awarding the prize in chemistry or physics or medicine to a country seems like it would dilute the award beyond recognition.
      - 11y ago