For Tu Youyou being surprised over winning Nobel Prize is overrated

False modesty can be detected from a mile. Donning the mantle of humility, of course, reaches competitive levels in award ceremonies like the Oscars. Not so in similar celebrations that fete scientific excellence. So, when one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine, Tu Youyou — her name giving the wrong impression that she always has your interest in mind — stated that she was “not really surprised” at receiving the award on Monday, the usual show of OMG! was finally exposed for what it almost always is: well-rehearsed spontaneity.

Sharing the Nobel for her discovery of artemisinin, an anti-malarial drug based on Chinese herbal medicine, Tu pointed out that her research had been successfully conducted “over a number of decades”. So, upon learning about the good news from television — behold, yet another virtue of TV — she “was a little bit surprised, but not really”. For the 84-year-old pharmaceutical chemist, who had won the prestigious Lasker Award (the ‘American Medicine Nobel’) in 2011 for the same reason, getting the gong was always going to be as unsurprising as Mohandas Gandhi not getting the Peace Nobel. But Tu has paved the way for the rest of us to stop feigning surprise, if not after winning a Nobel then on receiving that birthday gift one saw coming from a mile.