Yew-Turn For Old Growth -- Cancer Treatment Makes Tree, Once A Weed, Valuable

Environmentalists today opened a new effort to save old-growth trees in the Northwest, citing protection not for owls but for human beings.

The new action, announced at a Washington, D.C., press conference this morning, is aimed at saving the Pacific yew tree, which produces a compound used in experimental cancer treatments.

The yew, long viewed by foresters as a weed, has caused growing excitement among medical researchers, cancer patients and corporate executives because the compound shows promise in treating cases of ovarian cancer that don't respond to other drugs.

Taxol, derived from yew bark, is undergoing clinical trials among cancer patients. Ovarian cancer, the deadliest cancer of the female reproductive system, causes 12,400 deaths annually in the United States.

Elliott Norse, chief scientist for the Center for Marine Conservation, contrasted that death rate with U.S. Forest Service estimates that more than 20,000 jobs will be lost if the federal government adopts a scientific committee's plan for protecting the northern spotted owl's forest habitat.

``Not minimizing the loss of 20,000 jobs, we could be talking about drugs that could save the lives of many more than 20,000 people,'' Norse said.

Finding a long-term supply of taxol will require artificial synthesis of the chemical or production in yew plantations. There simply are not enough yew trees to support production of the medication in commercial quantities.

In response, the Weyerhaeuser Co. has been conducting a research program that could put the timber-industry giant into the pharmaceutical business with creation of the first yew plantations.

Meanwhile, the major source of taxol will be yews in the Northwest's old-growth forests.

Michael Bean, attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the yew controversy ``is just illustrative of the sorts of untapped mysteries and treasures that exist in virgin ecosystems like old-growth forests.''

But Bruce Beckett, Washington regional manager of the Northwest Forestry Association, reacted with disbelief to the petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the yew threatened.

``You're kidding me!'' exclaimed Beckett, who said a yew grows in his back yard in Gig Harbor. He called the petition ``absolutely and totally absurd.''

The slow-growing yew is most commonly found in the deeply shaded understory of older forests from northern California to southeast Alaska and from British Columbia to the Rockies of Montana.

Until now, yews had almost no commercial value, and loggers generally left the shrublike trees on the ground to rot or be burned in preparation for replanting.

The image of the yew began to change with the National Cancer Institute's discovery a decade ago that yew-derived taxol extends the lives of mice suffering from leukemia.

The yew is not a common tree in most Northwest forests, and experts say there aren't enough yews to produce commercial quantities of taxol if the drug is licensed by the federal Food and Drug Administration. The National Cancer Institute is negotiating an agreement with Bristol Myers-Squibb to produce taxol and obtain FDA approval for commercial use.

Weyerhaeuser has spent $250,000 over the past three years exploring techniques of growing yews as a renewable source of taxol. As a result of that research, said technology commercialization director Mark Hehnen, ``we're confident there can be a domestic cultivation scheme.''

Researchers are exploring two possibilities: growing yew seedlings to be harvested after several years, or growing hedges from which needles and limbs would be periodically trimmed.

Discussions are taking place with Bristol Myers-Squibb over a possible contract for yew production. Hehnen said Weyerhaeuser also is considering taxol production on its own or transferring the technology to another firm.

``At the moment we feel we're probably the best people in the country to grow large numbers of trees,'' Hehnen said.

The research program is three years old, and Hehnen estimated that another three years of research and development are required before commercial yew farming can begin.

Organizations petitioning for listing of the yew as threatened are the Environmental Defense Fund, National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife, Oregon Natural Resources Council and Center for Marine Conservation.

Joining the petition to list the yew as a threatened species were Susan Horwitz of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine's molecular-pharmacology department and William McGuire of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's oncology center.

The petition was supported by American Cancer Society President Robert Schweitzer, who wrote to Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan that taxol ``is proving to be a very exciting compound'' for treatment of ovarian cancer.

Rex Crawford, state Department of Natural Resources plant ecologist, said yews are ``scattered far enough and wide enough'' that the tree is in no danger of disappearing altogether.

John Destito, whose Olympia-based Advanced Molecular Technologies has salvaged 13,000 pounds of yew bark from logging operations for the National Cancer Institute, warned: ``You can't let people run through the forest thinking they can make a buck off this. We don't want to start a false gold rush.''

Until taxol is licensed by the FDA, Destito said, there will be no commercial market for the product.

The Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest has launched a study of yew populations but has not adopted any special guidelines for management of the species. Carol Aubry, geneticist for the forest, said yews are so rare in the forest that ``when we first started talking about this, some people in logging systems wondered why we were even talking about it.''

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service three months ago declared the northern spotted owl threatened. Environmentalists have petitioned the agency to extend protection under the Endangered Species Act to the marbled murrelet, a shore bird that nests in ancient forests, and the fisher, a weasel-like forest mammal.