Qinghaosu heads West


I'm going to fast forward to the early 1980s and the first reports about qinghaosu published in Western scientific journals. For the moment I'm ignoring the large numbers of scientific papers published in Chinese journals that came out at the same time, which you can easily find by searching PubMed (don't worry, I'll return to these later).

To begin, here are some highlights:

March 1982
Tu Youyou 屠呦呦 is the first Chinese scientist to publish a qinghaosu article in a Western scientific journal.
Tu You-you, Ni Mu-yun, Zhong Yu-rong, Li Lan-na, Cui Shu-lian, Zhang Mu-qun, Wang Xiu-zhen, Ji Zheng and Liang Xiao-tian. (1982) Studies on the constituents of Artemisia annua Part II*. Planta Medica 44:143-145.
(*Part I is Structure and reactions of arteannuin, published May 1979.)

13 March 1982
Veteran malariologist Leonard Bruce-Chwatt publishes a short letter describing qinghaosu.
Bruce-Chwatt, L.J. (1982) Qinghaosu: a new antimalarial. British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition) 284:767-768.

7 August 1982
Keith Arnold is the first Western scientist to publish a primary research paper on qinghaosu (in collaboration with Li Guoqiao 李國橋).
Jiang, J.B., Li, G.Q., Guo, X.B., Kong, Y.C. and Arnold, K. (1982) Antimalarial activity of mefloquine and qinghaosu. Lancet 2:285-288.

1983
Publication of two papers from a collaboration between Gu Haoming 顧浩明 (Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica); Li Zelin 李澤琳 (Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, Beijing); and David Warhurst and Wallace Peters (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine).
Gu, H.M., Warhurst, D.C. and Peters, W. (1983) Rapid action of qinghaosu and related drugs on incorporation of [3H]isoleucine by Plasmodium falciparum in vitro. Biochemical Pharmacology 32:2463-2466.
Li, Z.L., Gu, H.M., Warhurst, D.C. and Peters, W. (1983) Effects of qinghaosu and related compounds on incorporation of [G-3H] hypoxanthine by Plasmodium falciparum in vitro. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 77:522-523.

July 1984
The first entirely Western study of qinghaosu, conducted by Daniel Klayman at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the USA.
Klayman, D.L., Lin, A.J., Acton, N., Scovill, J.P., Hoch, J.M., Milhous, W.K., Theoharides, A.D. and Dobek, A.S. (1984) Isolation of artemisinin (qinghaosu) from Artemisia annua growing in the United States. Journal of Natural Products 47:715-717.

31 May 1985
Daniel Klayman finally brings the discovery out of the shadows and into the scientific mainstream when he publishes his famous qinghaosu review in Science.
Klayman, D.L. (1985) Qinghaosu (artemisinin): an antimalarial drug from China. Science 228:1049-1055.

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