Debate Over China Winning Nobel

chinese scientist Tu Youyou will be collecting China’s first Nobel medical prize next week for extracting an anti-malarial drug from a herb, but her achievement faced many controversies about the role of science in the extraction.

Traditional medicines are very important in the Chinese society, and Premier Li Ke Qiang stated that Tu’s discovery is “a great contribution of TCM to the case of human health.” However, a Nobel Prize committee Hans Forssberg mentioned “it’s very important that we are not giving a prize to the traditional medicine,” because he thinks that Tu’s work was inspired, not original.

The state run newspaper China Daily quickly rebutted Hans’s comment on TCM. He said that “Westernized reforms ignored the traditional theory about the body as a holistic system.” He also argued that people should not use Western science to judge TCM, and people should appreciate TCM’s effect on the human body.