Two scientists honored with China's top science prize

Zhao Zhongxian (left) and Tu Youyou [File photo]

President Xi Jinping gave China's 2016 Top Science and Technology Award to physicist Zhao Zhongxian and Nobel Medicine Prize 2015 co-winner Tu Youyou on Monday.

Zhao Zhongxian, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has spent four decades researching the superconductor.

Tu Youyou is best known for discovering artemisinin, or qinghaosu, used to treat malaria. She shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, becoming the first female to claim the award.

Five foreign experts, including Katharina Kohse-Höinghaus, a professor at the University of Bielefeld, were awarded China's international science and technology cooperation prize.

The Chang'e-3 project shared the Top Science and Technology Progress Award with 19 other projects.

The national top science and technology awards were established to cover science and technology, natural sciences, technical inventions, scientific and technological progress and international cooperation in science and technology.