Can you post or email the Algore quote about cutting down three trees to save one human life? Would be greatly appreciated and would make great ammo.

Thanks.

Yer Cougar pal in Pullman

-- Joe Hylkema (josephhy@wsu.edu), October 27, 1999

Answers

Happy to oblige!

The Pacific Yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die. It seems an easy choice -- sacrifice the tree for a human life -- until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated."

Al Gore "Earth in the Balance"

Westin

-- Westin (86se4sp@my-deja.com), October 27, 1999.

Ease up on Al Gore. It's only natural that he identifies with trees. He's about as wooden as any human I've ever seen.

-- zowie (zowie@hotmail.com), October 27, 1999.

Do you happen to know what chapter/page this quote appeared on in Algore's pile of dreck?

"The civil rulers execute, justly and sinlessly, pestiferous men in order to protect the peace of the state." --St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 146

-- Joe Hylkema (josephhy@wsu.edu), October 27, 1999.

This is a line that I haven't heard in years... "SAVE A LIFE, KILL A TREE?" It made a great headline in the New York Times. See:

http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/magazine/1996/960205/cancer.html

for an overview of the whole debate.

So is the loss of trees (now being grown in farms by Weyerhauser and others) worth human life? It's a rhetorical question - no need to answer. I know. The answer is yes. Ask any ovarian, lung, or breast cancer patient that can credit Taxol with a remission. The Yew has most certainly extended the life of my lady by at least 3 years. She had not been expected to live 3 months when she was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer in 1996.

Also, while the Yew tree is the original source of paclitaxel (trade name Taxol), it is now being synthesized in the lab. See:

http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1995/sept/taxol_950918.ht ml

However it is pricey - about $8,000 per treatment (and that's JUST the Taxol). And you think the cost of license tabs are outrageous. As Bristol-Meyers Squibb loses it's monopoly rights for production though, I assume the price will drop.

A cancer patient care giver,

-- Tom King (null@void.com), October 28, 1999.

Big business monopoly, if for no other reason to vote yes, there is certainly one. Wake up people, stop giving away your freedom!!! Vote "YES"!!!!

-- Paula (eagleross@pioneernet.net), October 31, 1999.