Tu Youyou discovers artemisinin
An ancient wormwood recipe yields a malaria cure
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Working in the secret Project 523, chemist Tu Youyou, guided by an ancient Chinese medical text, isolated the antimalarial compound artemisinin from sweet wormwood. Drugs based on it have saved millions of lives, earning her the 2015 Nobel Prize.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 25 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 24 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 23 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 8 years later
Europe
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 19 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 11 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 4 years earlier
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 17 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 17 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 15 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 11 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 13 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 17 years later
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 19 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 24 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 7 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 8 years later
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 18 years later
Africa
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 9 years earlier
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 5 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 5 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 2 years later
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 11 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 3 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 2 years earlier
- 1973 Chilean coup d'état — 1 year later
- 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens — 8 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 11 years later
Oceania
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 18 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 13 years earlier
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 20 years later
Alive at the time
- Pablo Picasso (aged 91)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 83)
- Mao Zedong (aged 79)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 54)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 42)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 88)
- Haile Selassie (aged 80)
- Golda Meir (aged 74)
- Jorge Luis Borges (aged 73)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 71)