Bengaluru :

India has not leveraged the treasure trove of Ayurveda in a scientific way, Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw said on Thursday.

“One of the big problems is that the outside world views us in a much better way than we view ourselves,” she said.

“This year’s Nobel Prize, for instance, went to number of scientists in medicine for malaria, river blindness, and one of them was none other than a Professor Youyou Tu who was really not a medical or PhD or any one of those people, but some one who was actually a great proponent of Chinese medicine….” Mazumdar-Shaw said.

“This should open up the opportunity for Ayurveda in a very big way. I think we as a country have not really leveraged the treasure trove of Ayurveda in a scientific way. This I hope will incentivise us and motivate us to to look at our own knowledge of Ayurveda and take it to a different direction”, she added.

“That’s the trend that we must create from India,” she added.

Mazumdar-Shaw, who is also the chairperson of Karnataka Vision Group on Biotechnology was speaking at an event organised to announce “Bangalore India Bio 2016” which is scheduled to be held from February 9 to 11 2016.

Tu (84) who is chief professor at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, discovered artemisinin, a drug that has helped significantly reduce the mortality rates of malaria patients.

Noting that agri-biotech can play a very important role in this, Mazumdar-Shaw said “using modern techniques in agri-biotech to actually delve into our Ayurveda and see whether we can amplify some of these very very important aspects of Ayurveda by the use of new technologies and modern technologies of agri-biotechnology”.

“This is another area which we must create into a trend because we cannot afford to loose the advantage that we currently have”, she added.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Bengaluru / PTI / October 15th, 2015