Artemisinin and Chinese Medicine as Tu Science

The story of discovery of artemisinin highlights the diversity of scientific values across time and space. Resituating artemisinin research within a broader temporal framework allows us to understand how Chinese drugs like qinghao came to articulate a space for scientific experimentation and innovation through its embodiment of alternating clusters of meanings associated with tu and yang within scientific discourse. Tu science, which was associated with terms like native, Chinese, local, rustic, mass, and crude, articulated a radical vision of science in the service of socialist revolutionary ideals. Yang science, which signified foreign, Western, elite, and professional, tended to bear the hallmarks of professionalism, transnational networks in education and training, and an emphasis on basic or foundational research. With respect to medical research, the case of artemisinin highlights how the constitution of socialist science as an interplay of tu and yang engendered different scientific values and parameters for scientific endeavor. Modern medical research in Maoist China could harness the productive energies of mass participation to technical expertise in its investigations of Chinese drugs, and under the banner of tu science, it became possible and scientifically legitimate to research Chinese drugs in ways that had previously provoked resistance and controversy.