Interesting article in the NY Times about the Nobel Prize going to Dr. Tu Youyou, the woman who "discovered" that Artemisinin, an active ingredient from the plant Artemisia annua was effective against malaria. Turns out she leaned heavily on the ancient Chinese medicine concepts and texts in her work on the extraction process, but the Nobel committee specifically said it was not honoring Chinese medicine, but the scientific procedure she used. Chinese medicine is a remarkably sophisticated system, with millennia of experience behind it, yet it does not fit into the Western scientific method. Our Western research structure, crowed by the double-blind placebo controlled cross-over trial, while amazing and useful, is unable to capture the complexity of Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, or really- as far as I know- any traditional medicine. I hold out hope that Systems Biology (https://sysbio.med.harvard.edu/) is better positioned to unpack complexity for us to beginto understand these systems in all of their elegance and power.
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