Mao behind Chinese anti-malaria drug that has set tongues wagging

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 US taxpayer’s dollars are spent on it for Africa every year.

But few people realise 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.

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 labour 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 US 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 US 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.