What is the mandate of NCIs Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine ?
I am the official liaison from NCI to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Now it’s congressionally mandated that each Institute have a full-time liaison to the Center. We were actually ahead of the game my position was put through before the mandate. As the NCI liaison, I direct all our collaborations with the national center, so if they want to develop a project, they will have one person to work through. In this capacity, I work with the center’s cancer advisory panel, which is composed of a variety of people some oncologists, research nurses, alternative medicine practitioners, someone from FDA. We had our first meeting on November 16th and are trying to identify common projects in which both the center and NCI have joint interests; projects that we can co-fund or that can be conducted through an NCI mechanism for doing clinical research. I also function as an interface between the alternative medicine community and the NCI scientists. For example, if res
