Medicinals for the millennia: the historical record

Nature has been a source of medicinal agents for thousands of years, and an impressive number of modern drugs have been isolated from natural sources, many based on their use in traditional medicine. The use of herbal drugs is once more escalating in the form of complementary and alternative medicine. The past century, however, has seen an increasing role played by microorganisms in the production of the antibiotics and other drugs for the treatment of some serious diseases. With less than 1% of the microbial world currently known, advances in procedures for microbial cultivation and the extraction of nucleic acids from environmental samples from soil and marine habitats, and from symbiotic and endophytic microbes associated with terrestrial and marine macro-organisms, will provide access to a vast untapped reservoir of genetic and metabolic diversity. By use of combinatorial chemical and biosynthetic technology, novel natural product leads will be optimized on the basis of their biological activities to yield effective chemotherapeutic and other bioactive agents.