Approval for commercial use was granted the following year, in record time. Yet taxol might never have made it this far. Because of the problems associated with its synthesis, the NCI gave it low priority as a candidate anticancer drug. The enthusiastic support of one or two 'product champions' ensured that the project was never abandoned. The fate of taxol thus turned as much on the internal politics and inertia of a large organization as on any traditional scientific criteria.
Every performance requires actors and a script.
While few actors were prepared to speak for taxol during the 1960s and 1970s, events following the publication of taxol's unique structure and mechanism brought many more actors onto the scene, all urging that taxol should be developed as an anticancer drug. Their shared enthusiasm, however, obscured the fact that they had overlooked taxol's real producer, the yew tree. No one had bothered to collect any new information about the yew, including such vital details as their number, their distribution, their habitat, concentration of taxol under different growing conditions and locations, and the average yield of taxol per tree. Only vague details existed. Logging companies traditionally considered the yew tree as waste.