Yearender 2015: China's top scientific achievements

Editor's note: The year 2015 witnessed some major breakthroughs by Chinese people in science, such as winning China's first Nobel Prize and rolling out the first large-scale domestically manufactured passenger airplane. Let's take a look back on some of the year's most remarkable achievements.

William Campbell, Satoshi Komura and Tu Youyou jointly won the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine for their work against parasitic diseases. [Photo/CFP]

Tu wins China's first medicine Nobel Prize

Chinese scientist Tu Youyou was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her contribution in fighting malaria. The 84-year-old won the prize for her work using artemisinin to treat malaria based on a traditional Chinese herb treatment, making her China's first medicine Nobel laureate.

In late 1960s, Tu started to chair a government project aimed at eradicating malaria. To find a new treatment to fight the disease, Tu and her colleagues looked through many ancient medical books and screened 2,000 recipes before they extracted artemisinin from sweet wormwood, a traditional Chinese herb. 

Related: Tu, nation's first winner of Nobel Prize in Medicine