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Use of simple synthetic drug called Chin – Yeh, Gold – plus – plant juice or red colloidal gold. Gold made body everlasting and the herbal principle, as soul, increased life-span. Dialectally it was called Kim – Iya. Arabicized as Al – Kimiya it finally appeared as Alchemy. Chin – Yeh as drug was only brick – red when mercury, and sulphur – with traces of gold were sublimated there resulted Chin – Tan, Gold – plus – cinnabar. It was blood – red and with redness as soul it became the ideal drug of longevity.

Prime Matter is matter-cum-energy. The first substance identified as such was lead. When gently heated it becomes red and redness means soul or energy so that lead was potentially red or soul-like and as such dual natured. Mercury also becomes red and can return to white metal. It was thus dual natured and was the second substance recognized as Prime Matter. First lead alone and then lead and mercury were considered as the source of all metals.

Alchemy as art tries to imitate creation such as spontaneous generation. The magic wands of creation, of Chinese origin, would be a compass and a triangular carpenter's square. Creation is represented by the dual-natured soul, comprising of the spirit (Ruh) and “the” soul (Nafs). The ultimate source is creative energy which emanates form the Divine word of command. Creative energy, in its non-manifest form, would be ultrasonic energy, which can be represented by a humming sourd. This would be sympolized by the humming sound. This would be symbolized by the humming sound of bees represent creative energy and in fig 3 the fiddle, as direct producers of a humming sound.

This article deals with the history of Indian Alchemy and surveys its gradual and fertile growth in ancient India.

Based on unpublished manuscripts, the article reveals the keen interest shown by Marcelin Berthelot in Indian alchemy. The French Savant has actually inspired and encouraged the first historical research in this field, undertaken at the end of the last century, in Calcutta, by the Bengali scientist Prafulla Chandra Ray.

In Rigveda Soma is an evergreen plant, with thousand stalks yellow hued bestowing auspicious energy. Resembling yellow fibres of hemp ephedra was rained in Chlnoso Ho-Ma, Yellow-hemp. It was Sanskritized as Soma. Being an energizer-cum-euphoriant its juice was consumed thrice daily. Finally it became a drug of longevity, rejuvenation and resurrection even god Soma. As drug it was substituted by Rasayana promisiig rejuvenation but also salvation. Soma with Water and Fire constitutes the proto-cosmology of Rigveda.

The availability of the recently completed Streptomyces coelicolor genome sequence provides a link between the folklore of antibiotics and other bioactive compounds to underlying biochemical, molecular genetic and evolutionary principles.

The world's most creative producers of natural pharmaceutical compounds are soil-dwelling bacteria classified as Streptomyces. The availability of the recently completed Streptomyces coelicolor genome sequence provides a link between the folklore of antibiotics and other bioactive compounds to underlying biochemical, molecular genetic and evolutionary principles.

Several studies have claimed to identify cardiac stem cells. But what criteria do such cells have to fulfil before we can be confident about their true potential?

During vertebrate development, mesenchymal progenitors capable of forming bone, cartilage, muscle, fat, or tendon arise from either neural crest or somitic mesoderm. Transcriptional programs that specify mesenchymal cell fates are initiated and modified by paracrine cues provided by TGF-β superfamily members and mediated in part via the regulated assembly of Smad-containing multiprotein transcription factor complexes. In this issue of the JCI, Hoffmann and colleagues have identified that Smad8 activation drives tendon formation from C3H10T1/2 cells, a murine cell line that recapitulates many features of normal multipotent mesenchymal cells (see the related article beginning on page 940). Cells programmed to the tenocyte cell fate in vitro formed tenogenic grafts in vivo. These results add to the accumulating evidence that proliferating, multipotent mesenchymal progenitor cells can be programmed to yield multiple cell types — e.g., osteoblasts, myocytes, chondrocytes, and tenocytes — that may be useful in cell-based therapeutic approaches to musculoskeletal diseases.