The reporting in Africa for this story was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. To see more stories in this series, click here.
In 1967, as the United States sank into war in the jungles of Vietnam and China descended into the cataclysm of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese soldiers secretly fighting alongside the North Vietnamese also battled swarms of malarial mosquitoes. Showing remarkable foresight, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong amassed a secret team of top scientists with one mission: find a cure for malaria.
As China then a poor country, barely recovered from a devastating famine added insult to injury by dismantling its scientific, medical, and educational institutions under Mao’s misguided program of political cleansing, the scientists labored on with clear purpose. Within a decade, some 500 researchers, many of whom were persecuted politically along the way, developed an ingenious drug called artemisinin, pulling off a medical marvel against the