Whipped Cream Difficulties

Robert Holton, big damn hero. He was 81.

Taxol is a hugely important drug in cancer treatment. It was originally isolated from the yew tree, but there just aren’t enough yew trees to go around. In order to isolate the drug, the trees had to be stripped of their bark, which killed them.

Dr. Holton was the first person to figure out how to synthesize Taxol in a lab, without killing yew trees.

“I have always been drawn to difficult problems, and synthesizing Taxol was a big one,” Dr. Holton said in 2018 during remarks at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Inventors in Washington, D.C. He was elected an academy fellow that year. “Seeing the drug’s success in treating so many patients has been an incredibly gratifying experience.”
The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than one million patients have been treated with Taxol. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992 for ovarian cancer and, in 1994, for advanced breast cancer. The chemo agent is also used for the treatment of lung cancer and Kaposi’s sarcoma, among other malignancies, Dr. Boyd said.

…

In 1994, The New York Times called Dr. Holton’s synthesis of Taxol “arguably the most important drug cobbled together by human hands.” The article also noted “the cutthroat competition” to synthesize what everyone believed was destined to become a multi-billion-dollar medication. In 1999, Bristol Myers Squibb earned $1.5 billion from sales of the drug.

Barry Longyear, SF writer. I don’t have a formal obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick put up a tribute/obit on his blog.

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