Although large drug companies are now concentrating on cheap synthetics as much as they are on natural compounds, the natural compounds still hold great promise in antibiotic resistance, in treating new diseases and old diseases not treatable by other means, and in dealing with the toxicity of some of those cheap synthetics. Reviewing both basic and applied aspects of natural products, this collection of 16 articles addresses fundamental issues, strategies such as automated analyses of HPLC profiles of microbial extracts, specific groups of drugs such as those to fight cancer, microbial diversity, including accessing the genomes of uncultivated microbes for novel products, and specific sources such as those from marine actinomycetes, rainforest endophytes, and traditional medicine harvesting in such places as Ecuador.