Product Description

Taxol is arguably the most celebrated, talked about, and controversial natural product in recent years. Celebrated because of its efficacy as an anticancer drug and because its discovery has provided powerful support for policies concerned with biodiversity. Talked about because in the early 1990s the American public was bombarded with news reports about the molecule and its host, the slow-growing Pacific yew tree. Controversial because the drug and the yew tree became embroiled in several sensitive political issues with broad public policy implications. Taxol has revolutionized the treatment options for patients with advanced forms of breast and ovarian cancers and some types of leukemia; it shows promise for treating AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma. It is the best-selling anticancer drug ever, with world sales of $1.2 billion in 1998 and expected to grow. Goodman and Walsh's careful study of how taxol was discovered, researched, and brought to market documents the complexities and conflicting interests in the ongoing process to find effective treatments. From a broader perspective, The Story of Taxol uses the discovery and development of taxol as a paradigm to address current issues in the history and sociology of science and medicine. Jordan Goodman is a Senior Lecturer in History at the Manchester School of Management, University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology. He has written on subjects as varied as the history of medicine and economic history for journal articles and in edited volumes. Goodman's previous books include Tobacco in History (Routledge, 1994) and Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology (Routledge, 1995). Vivien Walsh is Reader in Technology Management at the Manchester School of Management, University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology. She has been researching the pharmaceutical and chemical industry for years and is currently working on globalization of innovative activity in the face of technological and organizational changes in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and agro-food industries. Walsh has been a consultant to the European Commission and to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #634533 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 282 pages

Amazon.com Review
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

From Library Journal
Goodman (international economic history) and Walsh (technology management), both of the University of Mancheser Institute of Technology, have written a thorough account of the discovery, development, and politics of the cancer drug taxol. Like Goodman's previous book, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (Routledge, 1993), this is a succinct study and covers its subject from many viewpoints: the biology and supply of the Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia); the USDA botanists who looked for new plants; the National Cancer Institute researchers who tested compounds; the Forest Service, which controlled access to the trees; the contractors who collected the Taxus bark; the companies that extracted compounds; the cancer researchers who did the trials; and, ultimately, the company that synthesized and made money from taxol. To some, this story will be a wonderful example of how people working together can discover an important medicine; to others, it might be a good example of how tax money is used to subsidize big business. An excellent book for public and academic libraries. Margaret Henderson, Huntington, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New England Journal of Medicine
For anyone wanting all the details of the development of paclitaxel (Taxol) from its very beginning until it was marketed as a new, natural-product anticancer drug, this book is an excellent source of information. It is carefully researched and detailed, and as someone who was at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) during part of the development of Taxol, I found it factually accurate.

In the book, Taxol and the source of Taxol, the bark of the tree Taxus brevifolia, are treated as unique characters in a historical novel. The authors weave the story of the discovery of this drug and the intricacies of developing it from its natural source with the politics and effects of harvesting the tree from the forests of the Northwest. The book ends with a discussion of the impact of harvesting T. brevifolia on the local economy and the negative repercussions of the successful development by Bristol-Myers Squibb of a semisynthetic process for producing the drug.

Here, however, perception departs from reality. For example, cancer chemotherapy and the drug-development program of the NCI are wrongly portrayed as Goliaths in cancer treatment at the time, as compared with surgery and radiotherapy. The drug-development process is portrayed as having gone awry with Taxol, and Bristol-Myers Squibb is depicted as a robber baron who ran off with the credit for its discovery and with the rights for a drug developed with the public's money. Worst of all, after two decades during which methods for refining the harvesting process without continued damage to the forests were sought, the synthesis of Taxol by Bristol-Myers Squibb is said to have deprived a depressed economy in the Northwest of a source of income.

The actual story is quite different. First of all, although Taxol is a very effective natural product, it is not unique. There were other drugs before Taxol and some after it with equal effects and equally compelling stories. Some of them, like the vinca alkaloids and the epipodophyllotoxins, have been associated with bona fide cures of major cancers. Then there is the fascinating story, spanning three decades, of the development of the camptothecins, three of which are in clinical use. This is a far more intriguing story than that of Taxol and matches it in terms of integrating issues of forestry and drug development.

The NCI drug-development program, including the natural-products program, was established and maintained by pioneers such as Ken Endicott, Murray Shear, Jonathan Hartwell, Gordon Zubrod, and others for the purpose of finding new and effective treatments for cancer at a time when screening for anticancer drugs was largely derided by the academic community. All of them are mentioned in the book, but out of context, and in history context is all important.

The development of Taxol did not go awry at all. It worked according to plan, despite long odds and near misses. For example, had not the NCI drug-screening program been changed in the early 1970s to include human tumor xenografts in nude mice, the drug might have been abandoned for lack of activity in the old screening programs. It was also a small miracle that the crude extraction techniques used at the time could actually isolate activity from natural products. It was also remarkable that the people responsible for sending out teams to isolate bark for annual collections had the foresight to continue the collections while clinicians pondered whether the drug was worth it. A misstep could have cost additional years, at a minimum, or could have stopped the development process altogether.

From the beginning, the NCI drug-development program for both natural products and synthetic agents was intended to take the risks that pharmaceutical companies could not take to establish whether drugs could actually cure cancer (until recently, this was a hotly disputed issue) and whether there were drugs in nature that could be useful anticancer agents. It also was intended to determine whether there was a market for these drugs (also a disputed issue). It was never the intent of the NCI to stay involved in the development of any of the drugs it discovered or developed in collaboration with industry, nor was it possible for it to do so. It meant to offer such drugs at the earliest possible moment to established companies for development and marketing. Always included were plans to find ways to develop reliable methods for synthesizing very complex molecules to ensure a steady supply.

All this worked. When the program was established, there was no anticancer-drug market. Now, this market is profitable enough to attract major companies, and accordingly the amount of taxpayer money used by the NCI for this purpose over the years has declined substantially, as its need to be the risk taker has diminished. Most important, drugs can cure cancer, and thousands of lives have been saved or extended. Bristol-Myers Squibb has profited from its association with the NCI, but so have Americans who have cancer, and Bristol-Myers Squibb was one of the first companies to make a substantial investment in the development of anticancer drugs. The company is more a trailblazer than it is a robber baron.

With regard to credit: the chemists who initially extracted Taxol from the bark of T. brevifolia are fine and dedicated scientists. In truth, however, they were not the discoverers of Taxol in the usual scientific sense. The bark was given to them for extraction. The real "discoverers" were, once again, the people who supported the process of drug development, according to what appeared to be a utopian concept. They developed a relationship with the Department of Agriculture for collections, and they established contracts with natural-product chemists to extract active materials from collected plants. They defended the program annually before the Office of Management and Budget and the Congress, despite the fact that for many years, because of the long delay between discovery and application, the program was mostly regarded as a failure. It is really they who discovered Taxol and many other drugs.

Although this is an excellent and well-written book, its focus on the environmental and economic issues surrounding the extraction of drugs from forests clouds the history of a unique government program established by a handful of visionaries in the 1950s and 1960s.

Vincent T. DeVita, Jr., M.D.
Copyright © 2001 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Customer Reviews

long on history, short on biology
...I bought this book because some years back I did basic research with this remarkable substance and wanted to learn more about its background.The Story of Taxol is a very scholarly book, with footnotes almost as long as chapters, and extensive literature references. As the subtitle makes clear, the tale is mostly about politics, viz. politics within the National Cancer Institute and other agencies involved in the procurement of this initially natural chemotherapeutic agent. In minute details we are also informed about collections of bark of the pacific yew, the principal raw material for taxol prior to its total synthesis, as well as about the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of collection quotas. Because taxol's mode of action at the cellular and molecular level is completely different from that of other inhibitors of cell division it accounted for much activity in cell biology. The book is silent about this aspect. Whereas It may be a valuable addition to some libraries, overall it clearly offers too little of interest to the individual reader...