The excitement over the first Chinese winning the Nobel Prize in medicine became a viral hit online for all the wrong reasons. A fabricated speech that Tu delivered after she received the reward spread through WeChat in the past week. However, she only made one speech at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec 6.

The apocryphal version of her speech is poetic with literary ornamentation and mentions four main influences on Tu Youyou's life and career. These, not surprisingly, are not part of her original speech. Yet the doctored version was more welcome by many Chinese people, registering tens of thousands times hits on social media in one single day.

As Harvard Business Review said in October, there are two powerful drivers of viral success: psychological response - how the content makes you feel and social motivation - and why you want to share it. The greater the intensity of feeling the content evokes, the more likely people are to share it - the Web's answer to word of mouth, the most effective form of advertising.