Prize honors devotion to medical science

When the US-based Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced it was honoring Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou last weekend, some Chinese netizens said it reflected poorly on China's top academic institutions.

This was because the medical scientist was not a member of either the Chinese Academy of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Tu won this year's Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her team's discovery of artemisinin's use in the treatment of malaria a scientific advance that has saved millions of lives around the world.