Narrator: This is Science Today. A Chinese plant known as the sweet wormwood may hold the future for curing malaria, which continues to affect up to 500 million people around the world and causes 12 million deaths per year – primarily children in Third World countries. But current methods to extract molecules from the wormwood plant to create a highly effective anti-malarial drug called artemisinin, has its drawbacks.

Keasling: The problem with artemisinin is that it is far too expensive for anyone in Africa or in any developing world country to afford. The goal of our project is to produce artemsinin at 1/10 of its current costs.

Narrator: Jay Keasling, a chemical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, is working to create artemisinin in an economical and environmentally friendly way.

Keasling: The research that we’re doing for this anti-malarial drug is to take genes from a plant that produces the anti-malarial drug and transfer them to a bacterium, so that that bacterium can produce the anti-malarial drug and can do so in an environmentally friendly way and economically.

Narrator: For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.