Do we like Tu Youyou?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A huge, real contribution to people's lives and a clean record, but the record on her views beyond science is thin.
Tu Youyou is the Chinese researcher behind artemisinin, the malaria drug that came out of a secret government program called Project 523. She joined it in 1969 after earlier efforts had come up empty. She worked out that heat was probably wrecking the active ingredient in the plant, so she switched to a lower-temperature extraction.
The nearest thing to a scandal is a credit stoush, not a misconduct one. Because Project 523 was secret and collaborative, and papers back then carried no author credit, who gets the glory has been disputed in China. Two researchers who looked at the history, Louis Miller and Xinzhuan Su, concluded she deserves the major credit, and she herself says “All honor goes to the team, and such is China.”
On the harm check, nothing turned up. The searches found no remarks from her on LGBTQ+ or trans people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and no company she keeps that raises a flag. She doesn't do culture wars; that's honestly the whole list, so we're judging a quiet record, not a loud one.
Her critics are mostly arguing about China's science system, not about her. She has no PhD, never trained overseas and isn't a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and commentators quoted by Scientific American used that to question how the country rewards research. That says more about the system than about her.
The good stuff is real. In 2016 she gave a million yuan of her Nobel money to Peking University's Health Science Center for a talent award fund, and another million to the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences for young researchers. She also received China's Medal of the Republic in 2019.
There's nothing recent to report on her; the 2026 headlines are about a prize named after her, not about Tu herself. So it's a clean pass on both tests, with a point or two off only because we know little about her views outside the lab.