The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-Cancer Drug

Environmentalists have long urged that threatened habitats--the old-growth forests of Appalachia, for instance, or the Amazonian rainforest--be preserved on the off chance that the plants within them may contain natural cures for a host of ailments.

Such proved to be true of the Pacific yew, a tree found in higher elevations here and there throughout the Pacific Northwest. In its bark resides a chemical compound that has proved effective in battling certain kinds of cancers and leukemia. When the discovery of the compound was made in the early 1960s, write English researchers Jordan Goodman and Vivien Walsh, pharmaceutical companies raced to corner the market in Taxus brevifolia bark, formerly considered a kind of natural rubbish, while at the same time working to synthesize the compound artificially. For their part, environmentalists, arguing that yew forests sheltered endangered populations of plants and animals, including the Pacific Northwest spotted owl, fought to protect the tree from development. In the middle stood federal and state forestry agencies, which had to wrestle with the doctrine of multiple use of public resources. By the early 1990s, according to the authors, the yew had become "an important symbol for the fate of the American temperate rainforest in particular and the planet's ecosystem in general," caught in the utilitarian debate over human benefit and the needs of the environment. The debate died down only when the chief pharmaceutical company involved announced that it would develop Taxol through a semi-synthetic process using raw materials from a more abundant species of yew.

An illuminating case study in ecopolitics, Goodman and Walsh's book is useful reading for anyone with an interest in habitat preservation and science policy. --Gregory McNamee