Tu started her investigations at a time when some 240,000 compounds had already been screened, with none proving to be in any way effective. How was she to stand any chance of finding one that worked? Deciding on a different approach, Tu looked somewhere unorthodox: in the medical journals of ancient China. Perhaps, she thought, the cure for malaria could be sitting there in some ancient herbal remedy book from the Han, Zhou or Qing dynasties. Over the next two years Tu travelled around China, meeting up with practitioners, tracking down and reading ancient medical manuscripts, and collecting
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