Tu Youyou

1930 – present

Science & Invention

Tu Youyou is a Nobel Prize-winning Chinese malariologist and pharmaceutical chemist. She discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.

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Contemporaries

Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola

Their World

Global Events

1933 Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany

1936 Spanish Civil War begins

1939 World War II begins

1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor; US enters WWII

1944 D-Day: Allied invasion of Normandy

1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; WWII ends

1945 United Nations founded

1947 India and Pakistan gain independence

1948 State of Israel established

1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted

1949 People's Republic of China proclaimed

1950 Korean War begins

1953 Watson and Crick discover DNA structure

1955 Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

1957 Sputnik launched; Space Age begins

1959 Cuban Revolution; Castro takes power

1961 Berlin Wall constructed

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

1963 Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

1964 Civil Rights Act signed in the United States

1969 Apollo 11: first humans walk on the Moon

1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and independence

1973 1973 oil crisis

1975 Fall of Saigon; Vietnam War ends

1979 Iranian Revolution

1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster

1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall

1989 Tiananmen Square protests

1990 Nelson Mandela released from prison

1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union

1994 Rwandan genocide

1994 End of apartheid; South Africa holds first free elections

1997 Dolly the Sheep cloned

1998 Good Friday Agreement signed in Northern Ireland

2001 September 11 attacks

2003 Human Genome Project completed

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

2008 Global financial crisis

2010 Arab Spring begins

2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster

2015 Paris Agreement on climate change adopted

2016 United Kingdom votes to leave the European Union

2020 COVID-19 pandemic declared

2022 Russia invades Ukraine

In Their Field

1932 Chadwick discovers the neutron

1953 Watson and Crick describe DNA double helix

1964 Higgs proposes the Higgs boson

1969 ARPANET (precursor to the internet) launched

1990 Hubble Space Telescope deployed

2003 Human Genome Project completed

2012 Higgs boson experimentally confirmed at CERN

2019 First image of a black hole captured