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

The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-Cancer Drug by Jordan Goodman, Vivien Walsh. Cambridge University Press, £18.95, pp 282. ISBN 0 521 56123 X. Rating: ★★★

In the 1950s, the United States government set up a programme to look for cancer cures in the natural world. The US Department of Agriculture, in conjunction with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), sent researchers off into the wilds, and over the next 30 years 15 000 plants were collected and analysed from around the globe.

This all sounds like pretty swashbuckling stuff, yet the real drama of the programme lay not in the eventual discovery of Taxol—a powerful antineoplastic agent extractable from the bark of the Pacific yew—but in what happened next. If a drug is discovered by the government, who develops and markets it? If the drug can only be sourced from a rarity of the natural world, what happens when demand increases? This erudite page turner deals with every player, from the botanist who first catalogued fruit, bark, and needle specimens from a 25ft tree seven miles north of Packwood, through to the executive who later transferred the drug and most of the tree's rights over to Bristol-Myers Squibb. Admittedly, it does not dwell upon the major problems of solubility and tolerability that also slowed Taxol's transition from lab to clinic, but so what? The authors are quite clear from the beginning that to them the most interesting Taxol issue is the strange interrelationship that developed between potential wonder drug and humble woody host.

Nowadays, nobody would ever think of Taxol as a panacea. It is just another chemotherapy drug useful in treating breast, ovarian, and non-small cell lung cancer. At the peak of its fame, however, the Pacific yew was widely touted as the oncological equivalent of the goose that laid golden eggs. Indeed, as the bark stripping process inevitably killed the tree, for a while—just as with the legendary goose—the demand for Taxol seemed to threaten the Pacific yew's very existence.

From original sources the authors shrewdly explore the resulting sensationalism in the press that pitted timber merchants fighting cancer against environmentalists saving forests. They claim that lower yielding but more renewable sources (such as yew needles or cultivars) could have been developed earlier but that these were overlooked by the NCI for short term financial reasons. Without the perceived dependence on bark for a source, Goodman and Walsh argue that much of the circus accompanying Taxol's development need never have happened. They're probably right and yet, like all good circuses, it did produce some great moments of entertainment. Read this book if only to smile at the thought of the US Forest Service having to set up a sting operation to catch troublesome “bark poachers.”

There are always downsides, and the academic intrusions of Goodman and Walsh's authorial voice to discuss the relevance of events within something called actor-network theory (or how it is possible to write the biography of an inanimate object representing different things to different groups at the same time) are uniformly annoying and unnecessary. Fortunately, there are not too many of these, making them a relatively small price to pay for an otherwise highly enjoyable and informative book.

Figure.

Tree of life: the Pacific yew