Malaria remains one of the world’s biggest killers and also a massive economic drag on poor countries, poor families. One of our best weapons against this scourge is a drug known as artemisinin, which is harvested from the plant sweet wormwood and, as a crop, is about as predictable as corn or hog futures.A major new initiative to be launched tomorrow in Italy by Seattle-based PATH in collaboration with the French drug maker Sanofi aims to do industrial production of synthetic artemisinin.