The Tale of Two Drugs

Malaria is an ancient disease that has killed nearly half of all humans who ever lived and has rewritten the fate of many empires. Centered on two antimalarial drugs, quinine and artemisinin, this book tells the long history of humanity's struggle against malaria: from the decline of ancient Rome and the fall of the Inca Empire to Western colonial expansion and the Pacific War, malaria spread with human migration; and humanity's cures came from two places—the cinchona tree in the South American jungle and the sweet wormwood of East Asian wilds. Quinine, the active ingredient in cinchona bark, was identified and synthesized through the efforts of generations of chemists, becoming a life-saving drug for countless people, yet more than half a century later fell into the predicament of drug resistance. Ge Hong of the Eastern Jin dynasty wrote of "a handful of sweet wormwood" in his Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies; this record lay dormant for over 1,600 years until Tu Youyou rediscovered it while working on the secret "523" project, and artemisinin only went abroad in the early 21st century to become the mainstay of malaria treatment today. The author, Liang Guibai, is a scientist on the front lines of new drug development and a popular science writer. The book adopts a "half science, half literature" approach: historically verifiable events are faithfully restored, while scenes and dialogue are filled in with reasonable imagination, bringing figures such as Ge Hong, the Lima apothecary, the imperial physician, and the battlefield doctor vividly to life. The book also discusses how scientific innovation happens and asks: where is the next artemisinin?