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DR. CHESNEY: Good morning. I'm Margaret Chesney, the Deputy Director of the National Center
for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. And, I want to welcome you to the second NCCAM
Distinguished Lecture for 2006. This lecture series was introduced by NCCAM in 2002 and there
are two lectors each year, addressing complementary, alternative, and integrated medicine
from various perspectives – practice, history, research, and policy.
Dr. Steven Straus, our Director, who is here today, was kind enough to ask me to introduce
today's speaker, Dr. Ram Sasisekharan, who will speak to us about natural products.
Now, as many of you know, natural products, herbal therapies, food supplements, are among the
most frequently used complementary and integrative medicine therapies in the United States and,
actually, around the world. NCCAM is supporting basic and clinical research that focuses on
these products, investigating which are safe, which are effective, and, for those that have
health enhancing effects, into mechanisms to see how it might be that these products may work
and have their effects on our health, in both prevention and treatment.
This brings us to Dr. Sasisekharan's lecture today. After receiving a bachelor's degree in
physical sciences from Bangalore University in Bangalore, India, Dr. Sasisekharan received
his master's degree in biophysics, and a PhD in medical sciences from Harvard Medical School.
He's currently professor of biological engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I could tell you much more about Dr. Sasisekharan's background of his over 100 scientific
publications. The fact that he has five grants from NIH in the last three years.
But, you didn't come to hear me. So, I'd like to turn the podium over to Dr. Sasisekharan,
who will share insights on the challenges sciences face when researching natural products
in an increasingly technocentric health care environment. And, the potential that his research
has to be improve human health outcomes. So, please join me in welcoming Dr. Ram Sasisekharan
as he presents Natural Products – Challenges and Opportunities.
DR. SASISEKHARAN: Ladies and gentleman, Dr. Straus, first of all, I'd like to thank you for
inviting me to present at this Distinguished Lecture Series. It's truly an honor and a
privilege to be able to do that. I also want to acknowledge my longstanding support from the
National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which has been key for funding the research
programs that I'll be talking about, and for me to be on this podium today.
As the title suggests, what I'm going to do today is to talk about a specific example of
natural product, in terms of a class of molecules that truly have revolutionized modern
biological sciences in a certain way. But, I want to talk about that in the context of both the
challenges that it presented, historically, more specifically, in terms of some of the scientific
underpinnings, if you will, and how those challenges, in many ways, translated into opportunities,
from my perspective. And, really share with you a series of, you know, examples,
through a series of examples, to illustrate some of the key points.