纽约时报：中医药改变世界“多亏了毛泽东”
http://bbs.gmw.cn/thread-2996012-1-1.html
美国纽约时报发表述评《尽管惊斗，抗疟药品还是获奖》(For Intrigue, Malaria Drug Gets the Prize)说：中国发明的青蒿素是全球防治疟疾的最大成就之一，因而它的发现成为许多人津津乐道谁该是诺贝尔医学奖的候选人的争辩，也成为全球范围的一 些药品开发研究者们彼此几乎是勾心斗角的名利争夺;尽管如此，青蒿素本身总是获得了“美国诺贝尔奖”的拉斯克奖。
述评回顾了青蒿素药品的发现发明过程、描述了全球范围内的声誉争夺，说：其实，青蒿素的描述可追述到公元前168年，而首次清晰文字阐述则来自公元四 世纪的中国古代医药家葛洪。早在1950年代，在毛泽东的指示下，中国就开始了青蒿素药品的科研;而当今发现青蒿素清晰文字来源和做出成功提取的主要人物 是中国现代医学学者屠女士。
述评说，青蒿素药品的发现开发，源于毛泽东的政策;全球防治疟疾有了个答案，多亏毛泽东的政策。确实如此：是毛泽东下令做相关药品开发的，是他用自己 的权威和知识克服了当时几乎无法开展科研的困难条件、保护和支持了中国科研人员做相关药品开发的，由此才发生了后来围绕青蒿素而展开的各种药品开发。然 而，正如述评所说，当时和后来多年内，中国处在“隔绝”状态且没有专利法，因而，中国方面就无法从产权角度争辩谁先谁后了。
述评最后说：面对给全球人类带来造福的成就，诺贝尔奖或许将被迫考虑是否和如何给青蒿素药品的发现开发颁奖;可是，诺贝尔奖规定不能给去世的人颁奖， 是否给毛泽东颁奖就不在考虑之列了。那言外之意是：若毛泽东还在世，那么，有关青蒿素发现发明的诺贝尔医学奖就应该颁发给毛泽东，全球的相关药商或研究机 构的人就别彼此吃醋和争夺那名声了。
中医药是伟大的宝库，是我国独具特色的医学科学和优秀传统文化，屠呦呦用一株小草改变了世界。一个中医秘验方可以让千百万患者解除病痛。中国在几千年的历 史上，人民群众的健康中医药起到了重要的不可估量的作用，然而随着经济社会发展，大量“民间验方”散落在各地，不少中医的科研成果和秘验方不被政府部门重 视，甚至被拒之医学门外或被抛弃。这就是一种极大的失误。近年来多家媒体曝光了“一个老中医谋生的故事”“ 老中医成果获奖20年 一证难求却在当地推广难？”，办事难、办证难、推广难事件的发生。也充分暴露了我国目前中医中药在其故乡得不到重视的另一种糟糕局面。
新中国成立以来，特别是改革开放三十年来，党和政府一贯重视科技进步，高度重视中医药事业的发展，并先后出台了《中华人民共和国科技进步法》、《中华人民 共和国中医药条例》、《国务院关于扶持和促进中医药事业发展的若干意见》等法规政策。习近平主席在 2010年6月20日出席皇家墨尔本理工大学中医孔子学院授牌仪式也强调：“中医药学凝聚着深邃的哲学智慧和中华民族几千年的健康养生理念及其实践经验, 是中国古代科学的瑰宝,也是打开中华文明宝库的钥匙。深入研究和科学总结中医药学对丰富世界医学事业、推进生命科学研究具有积极意义”。根据国家的法规政 策，科技成果获奖后的推广转化，应当得到政府和主管部门积极扶持帮助；并为在科技成果工作中做出贡献者创造和改善有利的环境和条件，以利于再接再厉继续为 科技进步做出新贡献，研究出更高水平的新成果。但愿新一届政府在习近平主席的重要指示鼓舞下，为促进我国中医药的发展创出新的成果。让世界人民能以对我国 的传统中医药刮目相看。 转自人民网
哪里说"
中医药改变世界"?
无限拔高，断章取义。
而且这是NT在2012年发表的文章。
For Intrigue, Malaria Drug Gets the Prize
By
DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.JAN. 16, 2012
MADE TO ORDER Mao Zedong, center, demanded that Chinese scientists act when a malaria strain felled North Vietnamese troops. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Chinese drug artemisinin has been hailed as one of the greatest advances in fighting
malaria, the scourge of the tropics, since the discovery of quinine centuries ago.
Artemisinin’s discovery is being talked about as a candidate for a
Nobel Prize in Medicine. Millions of American taxpayer dollars are spent on it for Africa every year.
But few people realize that in one of the paradoxes of history, the drug was discovered thanks to
Mao Zedong, who was acting to help the North Vietnamese in their jungle war against the Americans. Or that it languished for 30 years thanks to China’s isolation and the indifference of Western donors, health agencies and drug companies.
Now that story is coming out. But as happens so often in science, versions vary, and multiple contributors are fighting over the laurels. That became particularly clear in September, when one of the Lasker Awards — sometimes called the “American Nobels” — went to a single one of the hundreds of Chinese scientists once engaged in the development of the drug.
LATE BLOOMER Sweet wormwood provides artemisinin, discovered decades ago in China. Credit Luigi Rignanese
Mao’s role was simple.
In the 1960s, he got an appeal from North Vietnam: Its fighters were dying because local malaria had become resistant to all known drugs. He ordered his top scientists to help.
But it wasn’t easy. The Cultural Revolution was reeling out of control, and intellectuals, including scientists, were being publicly humiliated, forced to labor on collective farms or even driven to suicide. However, because the order came from Mao himself and he put the army in charge, the project was sheltered. Over the next 14 years, 500 scientists from 60 military and civilian institutes flocked to it.
Meanwhile, thousands of American soldiers in Vietnam were also getting malaria, and the
Walter Reed Army Institute of Research began its own drug hunt. That effort ultimately produced mefloquine, later sold under the brand name Lariam.
While powerful, mefloquine has serious drawbacks, including
nightmares and paranoia. In 2003, dozens of American Marines in Liberia got malaria after refusing to take pills because of military scuttlebutt that
several Special Forces soldiers who killed their wives after returning home from Afghanistan in 2002 had been driven insane by the drug.
China’s effort formally began at a meeting on May 23, 1967, and was code-named Project 523, for the date.
Researchers pursued two paths. One group screened 40,000 known chemicals. The second searched the traditional medicine literature and sent envoys into rural villages to ask herbal healers for their secret
fever cures.
One herb, qinghao, was mentioned on tomb carvings as far back as 168 B.C. and praised on medical scrolls through the centuries, up to the 1798 Book of Seasonal Fevers. Rural healers identified qinghao as what the West calls Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood, a spiky-leafed weed with yellow flowers.
In the 1950s, officials in parts of rural China had fought malaria outbreaks with qinghao tea, but investigating it scientifically was new. It also had at least nine rivals from traditional medicine with some anti-malarial effects, including a pepper.
In the lab, qinghao extracts killed malaria parasites in mice. Researchers tried to find exactly which chemical worked, which plants had the most, whether it could cross the blood-brain barrier to fight cerebral malaria, and whether it worked in oral, intravenous and suppository forms.
Outmoded equipment slowed research. But by the 1970s it was known that the lethal chemical, first called qinghaosu and now artemisinin, had a structure never seen before in nature: In chemical terms, it is a sesquiterpene lactone with a peroxide bridge. Trials in 2,000 patients showed that it killed parasites remarkably rapidly.
However, the body eliminated it so fast that any parasites it missed made a comeback. So scientists began mixing it with slower but more persistent drugs, creating what is now called artemisinin combination therapy. (One new combination includes mefloquine.)
A 2006 history of the project by Zhang Jianfang, its former deputy director, contains some gripping details: petty disputes between rivals, Cultural Revolution street fighting that forced one laboratory into a basement, project doctors’ living on brown rice and vegetables as they did clinical trials in remote villages in China’s tropical southern mountains, and other doctors’ hiking the Ho Chi Minh Trail with the Vietcong.
Mao died in 1976; Project 523 was officially disbanded in 1981, though clinical work continued.
In 1979, Dr. Keith Arnold, a malaria researcher in Hong Kong who had helped the Army develop mefloquine, wangled his way into China, hoping to test his drug there. He met Dr. Li Guoqiao, who was testing artemisinin variants. They decided to try head-to-head trials, and the Chinese mystery drug beat his, Dr. Arnold said.
Soon, World Health Organization scientists asked for articles from China’s medical journals, the first of which had been published in 1977, in response to reports that a Yugoslav chemist was experimenting with wormwood.
In 1982, The Lancet had an article by Chinese researchers. It won a prize, but the check, in British pounds, could not be cashed in China.
Photo
EARLY CURE An illustration from the 1941 Bulletin of the History of Medicine depicted the idea that quinine’s source, the cinchona tree, was named for a countess in Peru
Shortly thereafter, Dr. Arnold said, Walter Reed scientists found wormwood growing on the banks of the Potomac and extracted artemisinin. Nonetheless, the drug languished. The W.H.O. did not endorse it until 2000, and it was not widely available until 2006.
The reasons for that delay are disputed. China was in political disarray. Different labs in and outside China were working on derivatives. Patent law had vanished under communism, and China never took out Western patents, so there was no way a major drug company could get a monopoly and make big profits. Malaria was a disease of the poor, and today’s big donor funds did not exist.
Aid agencies could not buy drugs that were not W.H.O.-approved. For years, Dr. Arnold said, he tried to get permission for his Chinese collaborators to do clinical trials in Thailand and Vietnam, but the W.H.O. stalled. (As a United Nations agency, it is rarely bold, but the 1990s were a decade of particularly low morale and constant infighting.)
As nearly one million African children a year died, Dr. Arnold denounced its indecisiveness as “genocidal.”
The American military stuck with mefloquine, despite its expense. As late as 2002, as Doctors Without Borders clamored for artemisinin, an adviser to the United States Agency for International Development dismissed it in
an interview with The New York Times as “not ready for prime time” and defended chloroquine and other old, cheap drugs even though resistance to them was widespread.
A Swiss company, Novartis, finally broke the logjam. It bought a new Chinese patent on a mix of artemether, an artemisinin derivative, and lumefantrine, another Chinese drug, and took out Western patents, planning to sell it under the name Riamet at high prices to tourists and militaries; in 2001, it agreed to sell it nearly at cost to the W.H.O. under the name Coartem.
The money to buy the drug on a large scale became available with the creation of the
Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2002 and the Bush administration’s introduction of the
President’s Malaria Initiative in 2005. Now, about 150 million doses of several combinations are bought for poor countries each year.
With that victory, surviving Project 523 scientists and some outsiders began vying for credit. In 1996, a Hong Kong science foundation recognized 10 team leaders. In 2009, Zhou Yiqing got the European Patent Office’s
“Inventors of the Year” award for Coartem.
In September, the $250,000
Lasker Award for clinical medical research was given to Dr. Tu Youyou, former chief of the
Institute of Chinese Materia Medica in Beijing. The Lasker committee named her
“the discoverer of artemisinin.”
Some Chinese and Western malariologists were outraged.
Dr. Nicholas J. White, a prominent Oxford malaria researcher, said it was “not fair to credit this discovery to one individual”; he named others he considered equally deserving, including the clinical trial leader, Dr. Li, and a chemist, Li Ying.
Dr. Arnold, whose work with Dr. Li was mentioned in the Lasker citation, agreed. Richard K. Haynes, a malaria researcher and historian at the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, called naming one inventor “a travesty.”
The Lasker Foundation declined to comment, other than to note that Dr. Tu’s citation mentioned that Project 523 was a large collaborative effort.
In an interview before the ceremony, Dr. Tu, 81, argued that she deserved it because her team had been the first to isolate qinghao’s active ingredient while other teams worked on the wrong plants.
Also, after rereading a manuscript by Ge Hong, a fourth-century healer, prescribing qinghao steeped in cold water for fever, she realized that boiling, the typical extraction method, was destroying the active ingredient. She switched to ether, and qinghao became the first plant extract 100 percent effective at killing malaria in mice.
And before human testing began, Dr. Tu said, she and two colleagues took it themselves to make sure it was not toxic.
Before the West even heard of the drug, she said, she was one of the four anonymous authors of the initial 1977 paper, and in 1978, she was chosen to accept the Chinese government’s overall award to Project 523.
However difficult winnowing the field would prove, the Nobel Prize committee would be forced to do it anyway. The Nobel rules specify no more than three winners. And no posthumous prizes, either — meaning Mao would be out of the question.
