Chinese herbal expert among Nobel medicine prize winners

Yahoo – AFP, Pia Ohlin, 5 Oct 2015

The portraits of the winners of the Nobel Medicine Prize 2015 (L-R) Irish-born

 William Campbell, Satoshi Omura of Japan and China's Youyou Tu are displayed

 on a screen during a press conference of the Nobel Committee (AFP Photo/

Jonathan Nackstrand)

A trio of scientists earned the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday for unlocking revolutionary treatments for malaria and roundworm, helping to roll back two parasitic diseases that blight millions of lives.

Tu Youyou of China won half of the award for her work on artemisinin, an anti-malarial drug based on ancient Chinese herbal medicine, the Nobel jury announced.

She is the first Chinese woman national to win a Nobel prize in science, and only the 12th woman to win the medicine prize among the 210 laureates honoured since 1901.

Irish-born William Campbell and Satoshi Omura of Japan shared the other half for an anti-roundworm treatment dubbed avermectin, derived from soil-dwelling bacteria.

"These two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually," the Nobel committee said.

Tu Youyou, who helped discover the therapeutic treasures of artemisinin in lab

 work at the height of China's Cultural Revolution, was honoured with the 2015

Nobel Prize for Medicine (AFP Photo/Jonathan Nackstrand)

"The consequences in terms of improved human health and reduced suffering are immeasurable."

Tu, 84, has been chief professor at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine since 2000.

She conducted research in the 1970s, at the height of China's Cultural Revolution, that led to the discovery of artemisinin, a drug that has slashed the number of malaria deaths.

Traditional medicine

The treatment is based on traditional medicine -- a herb called sweet wormwood or Artemisia annua.

Artemisinin-based drugs are now the standard combination for treating malaria since the mosquito-transferred Plasmodium parasite developed resistance to other drug types like chloroquine.

Irish-born scientist William Campbell was praised for helping to develop a new

 therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites (AFP Photo/Jonathan

Nackstrand)

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were about 198 million malaria infections in 2013 and 584,000 deaths -- most of them African children.

Social media users in China saw the award as a source of national pride for the country.

"Nobel Prize, good. More international achievements recognised globally represent China's rise," read one post on Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter.

The other half of the prize honoured Omura and Campbell for "a new class of drugs with extraordinary efficacy against parasitic diseases," the Nobel statement said.

Registered drugs derived from avermectin "have radically lowered" the incidence of river blindness and elephantiasis, both caused by parasitic worms, it added.

River blindness

River blindness, also known as onchocerciasis, is caused by a worm transmitted to humans through the bites of infected blackflies. Its symptoms include disfiguring skin conditions and visual impairment, including permanent blindness.

More than 99 percent of those affected by it live in Africa.

Elephantiasis, or lymphatic filariasis, is a mosquito-borne infection which causes grotesque and disfiguring swelling of the limbs.

Japanese scientist Satoshi Omura was praised for developing Avermectin, 

a drug that radically lowered the incidence of River Blindness and Lymphatic

Filariasis (AFP Photo/Jonathan Nackstrand)

Omura, a microbiologist, isolated new strains of a group of bacteria called Streptomyces, and successfully cultured them in the lab.

Campbell, a research fellow emeritus at Drew University in New Jersey in the United States, was born in Ramelton in County Donegal in northwest Ireland.

His role was to show that a component from one of Omura's cultures was active against parasites -- this became avermectin.

Campbell, who made his discovery while working for pharmaceutical group Merck, thought he might be the victim of a prank when the committee called to tell him he had won.

"You must be kidding!" the 85-year-old told the Nobel Foundation.

"First thing I did was to ask for a way to verify that this could be genuine because it just seemed impossible," he said, adding that he only believed it after checking the Nobel website.

"I humbly accept the prize," 80-year-old Omura, a professor emeritus at Kitasato University, said in an interview with the Nobel Foundation.

He thanked the "many, many researchers" who had contributed to his findings, saying he was "very, very lucky".

Satoshi Omura, professor of Kitasato University,

 reacts as he is congratulated by students after

 winning the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine, while 

attending a press conference at the Kitasato

 campus in Tokyo on October 5, 2015 (AFP Photo/

Yoshikazu Tsuno)

Juleen Zierath, the head of the Nobel committee, said she believed Swedish scientist and philanthropist Alfred Nobel -- who created the awards in his 1895 will, to be given to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind" -- would have been pleased with this year's choice of laureates.

'Saving lives'

"I think we have examples here that have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. These therapies, they save lives, they prevent disability, and they prevent the spread of infection. And they also improve the life, the well-being of individuals and economic growth. So I think this is a great example. Nobel would have been happy," she told the Nobel Foundation.

This year's Nobel laureates will share the prize of eight million Swedish kronor (about $950,000 or 855,000 euros).

The Nobel awards week continues with the announcement of the prize for physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday.

The peace prize will be awarded in Oslo on Friday, with the economics prize wrapping up the Nobel season next Monday.

The laureates will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel.

Chinese herbal expert among #Nobel medicine prize winners http://t.co/z2Hk81ydCY pic.twitter.com/WxkeWY5Ndz

— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) 5 oktober 2015

Related Article:

"The Biggest Filter" - July 18-19, 2015 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) - (Text version)

“..  The Biggest Filter that Hinders Truth is Your Biased Knowledge

The biggest filter of humanity, the one that keeps Humans from actual truth, believe it or not, is called knowledge. We speak of that which humanity perceives currently as knowledge. That which you do not know is, therefore, future knowledge. Now, every single scientist understands the difference - every single one - for they know what is coming is going to teach them what they don't know yet. This is part of the scientific process. Even so, they take what they know, or think they know, and completely let it temper the experiments for what they don't know. They base the future on what they know or believe, even though they know better!

A medical doctor will look in the past and he'll remember being taught about a time when humans would report to the barbershop for healing. That's when they would actually bleed people for healing. By the way, that's the reason for the barber pole having the red stripe on it - it's the tradition of barbers doing the bleeding. So back then, you went to get healed in the barbershop by being bled! This, of course, led to many deaths because there was no understanding of germs, sterilization or today's common sense. Doctors know this, and they laugh at how far you all have come from this. So doctors absolutely know that what is coming will someday be actually laughable, yet they are also absolutely and completely closed to what it might be. They just think it will be an advancement of what they currently know.  ….”

“..  Medicine - Where It's Going

I want to show you some other areas to consider. There are several categories that we'd like to talk about, but they're not in a specific order except for the last one. So let's talk about medicine. What is future medicine going to look like?

The most elegant predictions of medicine fall short of what's really coming. What you have today is a high-tech approach to designer chemistry. Now, since the body is made up of chemistry, it makes sense to look at this chemistry and work with it. It makes total sense to discover how it reacts to disease and then design cures with more chemistry. It's absolutely normal what you have done, but it's going to reach an end very soon. Because the future of medicine is physics, dear ones, not chemistry.

You're going to start understanding and developing new medical physics. You will discover that medi-physics is going to literally speak to cellular structure and give it instructions, without one chemical involved. There's always a reaction to chemistry, isn't there? There's always a side effect. When you push one thing, something else reacts, doesn't it? How do you like it so far? Your most elegant chemical designs, the ones that are helping with the worst diseases on the planet, all have side effects - and some of those side effects are death! I say to you, how do you like it so far?

Does it really seem elegant to you? Or perhaps it's just a more sophisticated way of bleeding in the barbershop? Dear ones, that's how you're going to look at it someday! You're going to slap your heads and say, "Remember the day when we did everything with chemistry and drugs?"

Right now, these kinds of changes have already started in several areas. There are discoveries being made that are healing some of the most heart-breaking diseases you have. I reveal one, because it's not a secret. I will always give you information that is either being worked on or has been postulated through free choice on this planet. That is the guideline of channelling. We can't give it to you. You've got to develop it yourself. However, we can put you in an energy that has a faster discovery potential - that is to say, discoveries become more obvious.

Alzheimer's is heart breaking. There are millions on this planet who develop this condition, more all the time. You're living longer and a plaque-like material that literally obfuscates your memory within the brain is becoming more common. It clings to certain parts of your brain, encrusting and restricting it, imprisoning the Human's ability to remember and eventually process information at all. The result is death, slow death. It's caused by your environment, a fact which will be discovered eventually. Your long-lived Ancients didn't have it.

It's going to be cured with physics. Your science is starting to find out that the plaque-like substance has a resonance that allows it to be weakened with sound. High-frequency sound, tuned to a certain frequency and amplitude, will cause the sheaths to weaken, dissolve, and come off. There's a lot of research to do yet, but it's a Eureka! moment - realizing that physics alone, without chemistry, can change the structure of biology. This is with no side effects whatsoever. It's coming, it's coming.

There are those working with fresh umbilical cord stem cells right now who are using pure physics to guide the stem cells to a specific destination in the body in order to repair failing systems. Dear ones, the future of health and healing is not through better chemistry, yet medicine is still waiting for better pills! Did you connect the dots and realize that all biology is physics based? There is magnetics, leverage, the energy of consciousness, electricity and much more within cellular structure. With physics alone, you can "tune in" to disease and destroy it! You can fine-tune your system with cooperative resonances and extend life with benevolent, physical assistance. Sixteen years ago, I told you this when I spoke of the Temple of Rejuvenation. I described the super-cooling needed to do it and the temperatures needed to work with it (-55C). This is physics!

Now, the false expectation of greater chemistry for the future is totally caused from the filter of knowledge. What you have and know then gives you your expectation of what is going to take place. It literally blocks you from seeing some of the potentials that you may have.  ….”