The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-cancer Drug (review)

Jordan Goodman and Vivien Walsh. The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-cancer Drug. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiii + 282 pp. $27.95 (0-521-56123-X).

Taxol, originally extracted from the bark of the Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia, became one of the few important anticancer drugs developed in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s and early 1990s it also became the focus of important debates over the conservation of ecosystems, and on the relationships between research in the public sector and the pharmaceutical industry. Jordan Goodman and Vivien Walsh retrace in detail the history of taxol from the early 1960s, when its antitumor activity was first displayed in the framework of the NCI-USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) Plant Screening Program, to the late 1990s, when it became a major anticancer drug produced and marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, a company that obtained exclusive rights to the production and marketing of "Taxol." At that time, the links between the drug "Taxol" and the plant Taxus brevifolia were severed, and the drug entered a second career as a semisynthetic product, which, moreover, had an increasing number of active analogues.

Goodman and Walsh's meticulous research—one has the impression that they talked with practically everybody involved in Taxol research and production all over the world and read every accessible piece of paper, be it published material or private and semiprivate archives—and their impressive ability to synthesize the collected data, provide an exhaustive account that retraces a detailed history of Taxol and efficiently explains the origins of controversies concerning this substance, their content, and their outcome. The Story of Taxol is, however, much more than a case study. It is a highly instructive display of recent developments in biological and biomedical research. It illuminates crucial aspects of drug production, science policies, and ecological debates. Above all, the book's name is well chosen: it is indeed an excellent story.

The authors have chosen two distinct frameworks for this story: "the biography of an object," an approach advocated by the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff, and the "actor-network theory" advocated by the sociologists of science Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. The biographic approach focuses on the fate of a single item—here, a chemical substance that, at different times and places, played different roles and is perceived in a variety of ways: as part of an ecosystem, a research tool, a drug, a chemical entity, an instrument of political leverage. The actor-network theory focuses on relationships and follows the ways in which actors—either human or nonhuman—are shaped and transformed through their interactions. These two approaches are related but not identical; hence the tension, perceptible in some parts of the book, between a narrative that privileges the history of an object, and an analysis that is mainly interested in the social, legal, and political consequences of Taxol's production. Nevertheless, both chosen frameworks successfully display the complicated, contingent, and multidimensional aspects of Taxol's trajectory.

Writing a biography usually entails making choices between what to include and what to exclude. Taxol's biography is not an exception: Goodman and Walsh provide a detailed account of institutional policies, ecopolitics, and business histories, but they have omitted an equally detailed account of the industrial developments and the scaling-up procedures that made possible the transformation of Taxol into a mass-produced item. Moreover, there is very little in the book to remind us that we are reading the story of a cancer drug. The authors describe the clash between the aspiration to produce a sufficient amount of a potent antitumor drug and the need to protect the environment, but they do not dwell on the practical uses of this drug. There is a limited amount of information on clinical tests of Taxol...