CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 78Pharmaceutical Economics and PolicyGlobal Public Health Policies and EpidemiologyBiomedical Ethics and Regulation

Cancer chemotherapy, biodiversity, public and private property: The case of the anti-cancer drug Taxol

Walsh, Vivien, Goodman, Jordan·1999·Social Science & Medicine
DOI 10.1016/s0277-9536(99)00161-6
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The drug taxol has been hailed by many in the cancer community as a major breakthrough in the treatment of cancer. It has already been approved in use against ovarian and advanced breast cancer in many countries worldwide. Taxol has also promoted profound debates in the policy arena not, as one might expect, because of the characteristics or purposes of the drug itself, but because of other far-reaching effects. Taxol is a complex compound found in the bark of the Pacific yew tree, primarily in Oregon and Washington in the USA. The bark was first collected in 1962 and cytotoxicity demonstrated in 1964. Yet it was not until 1989 that the first results of clinical trials were reported. In the US taxol was then rushed through the Food and Drug Administration's regulatory procedures, approval being granted for use in refractory ovarian cancer in 1992. The controversies surrounding taxol surfaced in 1989 and grew substantially over the next few years. In this paper we examine two principal controversies concerning taxol, the first of which focused on apparent conflicts between the needs of environmental protection and those of cancer chemotherapy. Although the media portrayed this as a clash of interests between the environment and people with cancer, we argue that it was an attempt to increase lay participation in biomedical decision making and policy formulation. The second controversy was between health policy and the transfer of public scientific property to the corporate sector. The pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb was given exclusive rights to provide taxol from Pacific yew trees under a Co-operative Research and Development Agreement signed in 1991. While this was seen to be in the US Government's (as well as the company's) interest, it provoked a public reaction questioning the terms and consequences of the transfer of publicly generated scientific knowledge to the private sector.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/s0277-9536(99)00161-6

Cites

59 of 59 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

5 of the 64 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Walsh, V., & Goodman, J.
Affiliations
University of Manchester (GB)
Corresponding author
Walsh, Vivien
Venue
Social Science & Medicine
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
1999-11
Volume
49
Issue
9
Pages
1215-1225
ISSN
0277-9536 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/s0277-9536(99)00161-6
OpenAlex
W2102531181
Cited by
78
References
64
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 3
FWCI
2.64
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Social Science & Medicine (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Funders
Wellcome Trust
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Biomedical Ethics and Regulation
Keywords
paclitaxel, Pacific yew, cancer chemotherapy, biodiversity, public property, private property, Bristol-Myers Squibb, pharmaceutical patents, scientific knowledge transfer, health policy, environmental protection, drug regulation, FDA approval, ovarian cancer, breast cancer
MeSH terms
Antineoplastic Agents, Phytogenic, Drug Industry, Health Policy, Humans, Phytotherapy, Oregon, Trees, United States, Private Sector, Paclitaxel, Ecosystem, Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review