Front Street Weekly; 712

[silence] [test tone] [music] [music] [host]It sounds incredible but yew trees may contain a substance that fights cancer. The key question is how many of these Oregon evergreens should be cut down to benefit medical research. [male voice]I think it's the last yew tree, [wood?] The last yew tree is cut down. to save your mother and father that possibly both have cancer. What have we lost? I think we've gained a lot. [previous line] ...to save your mother and father that possibly have cancer [woman]There are parts of Oregon where the old west still lives on; wild horses roaming the open

range. But some people think the rules that protect these animals need to be changed. We'll find out why. [host]And here's a problem that all young families confront: how to get the kids to slow down long enough to take some cute pictures. Well tonight Steve Aimen will focus his special attention on this parental paradox. [Jim]Good evening I'm Jim Swenson. [Gwyneth]And I'm Gwyneth Gamble Booth. Welcome to this edition of Front Street Weekly. [Jim]Our first story tonight mixes modern science with some ancient legends. Throughout history the Yew tree has figured in myths literature and even religion. Now researchers think the Yew tree may provide a key weapon in the fight against cancer. But those findings may threaten the dwindling population of the trees as Hope Robertson explains. [Hope]The mysterious yew tree. It can be spooky looking with its gnarled trunk and

limbs, moss covered, nearly groaning or maybe whispering secrets. Ancient cultures thought the yew held the secret to immortality. The Samarians, the Greeks, Romans, and the Druids revered it as a holy tree. The yew is a tree steeped in legend. [Jim]Sherwood forest of course. Robin Hood and his merry band. Their longbows were made of yew. Shakespeare used it, a handful of times, and Hamlet the prince, the prince's father was actually killed by the uncle with a yew poison poured in his ear. [Gwyneth] But today author Hal Hartsell is one of only a few who know much of anything about the yew True there are craftsmen around who still insist on the yew to make their long bows and a handful of exporters who realize its value in refurbishing antique European furniture. But out in the woods, loggers regard the yew as a nuisance, a pest that gets in the way of efficiently harvesting the much larger Douglas fir trees.

So, in the United States the yew's home has been on the loggers' garbage heap, the slash pile. And yet, all at once, this raggedy tree has become a modern-day Cinderella. In its bark, scientists found a molecule that kills cancer cells. The National Institutes of Health have been running clinical trials on patients with many different kinds of cancers. There have been few side effects and promising results. Suddenly people are realizing there may be something to this tree of immortality legend after all. And yet the yew continues to be wasted. In 1987 the National Cancer Institute hired an Oregon man to harvest 30 tons of bark for its clinical trials. [male] I heard of this event, this invitation [unclear]. That was the first time I'd heard of yew trees. [Gwyneth] Pat Connelly contracted with several crews to harvest the bark. The Forest Service

cooperated by issuing permits to cut and strip hundreds of yew trees in Oregon. Leroy McKinney and his crew had one of those permits. [male voices] It was helping cancer... Yeah, my blood grandma died of cancer. So you know if it's going to help out I'm all for it. You know I might have cancer before long too, if I keep smoking. [Gwyneth] This forest was already scheduled for clear cutting the old growth Douglas fir. [male] And when one of these big fat trees like this go down, and they just splatter, you know, that's the end of the yew. I'm glad to see that they can go in here and salvage it before they they sell the timber. [Gwyneth]They packed up the bark to ship to the cancer research program and they sold the wood locally. The plan made sense. Why waste the yeew on a slush pile when it could be used to treat cancer. But the yew logs are heavier than most; it's a lot of work dragging them out of the forest -- much easier to just strip them standing. Easier, but

illegal. [male]what we're looking at here is trees that either have been stripped standing, or cut down and stripped, because it was easier to strip the whole tree. We've got an example here. They just reached up as high as they could get, they didn't even bother to fall the tree. Two more over here. [Gwyneth] Jim Wamsley estimates that six or seven hundred trees were stripped in his ranger district. He thinks that half the bark that left this forest was probably stolen. [Hope]It's been five months since these trees were stripped of their bark. Just by looking at them you can't really tell anything is wrong. Nature has slowly covered up the crime that was committed here. You see, when you remove the bark from all the way around the trunk, nutrients have no way of traveling up the tree and so it dies. These trees have been killed for their bark. [woman]Is there any other possible use that someone might have for the bark of yew tree?. [male]No, that's, that's a new wrinkle as far as with cancer

research, that was a real surprise to us. [woman]Well who's responsible? [male] For that? well ultimately there's only one buyer in the area for yew wood bark. [gwyneth?] Do you Do you think you might have taken any bark for which you didn't have any permits? [male] Oh I'm sure we did. [woman]The only person buying bark for the National Cancer Institute was Pat Connelly. [Pat] People, towards the end, would bring us bark. They found out that it was a very profitable thing to go out and pick bark. And a couple people at the end told us they were getting bark on private land. I found out later they were not getting it on private land. [woman] What do you think was happening?. [Pat] I think they were going into national forests and just helping themselves. [Gwyneth] Connelly says he volunteered to identify those people who may have been stealing the bark. But the government's hands are tied. There's no way to prosecute unless a witness to the bark theft comes forward. Wamsley says that for bark collection to continue in his part of the forest, Connelly has to scrupulously check all permits.

[Pat?]We're not saying we don't want to participate in cancer research, or say no, but the way this has worked out, we don't want that, that, not at the expense of the species. .... [unclear] don't want to see it destroyed this way. [Gwyneth] The yew is already being destroyed on a regular basis. It's not nearly as common a tree as pine or Douglas fir. But when those trees come down so does the yew. And most of the time the bark and the wood are simply wasted. [Pat]You must understand, when I started on this project there was a slight environmentalist concern. But when I learned, if, if we weren't collecting the bark for the cancer research program, the yew tree. Would have quietly been destroyed in the clearcutting fir process. Though it looks to me like yew was destined for destruction.

irregardless. [Gwyneth] So as far as the Forest Service is concerned the yew wood trees still belongs on the slash pile. Pat] It winds up there for the most part [unclear words, sounds] Yes. Gwyneth] Jerry Rust owns several acres of some of the oldest yew trees in Oregon. Just a few steps away this land is owned by the federal government. Rust wants to see these 40 acres of yew trees set aside as a national yew grove. If we don't save some now, he says, it'll take hundreds of years to replace what we have. [Rust] If this was a fir tree you would maybe expect this to be about 25 years old, but this tree is about two hundred and fifty to three hundred years old. [Gwyneth] It takes about 30 years for an average yew tree to put on one inch of growth around its trunk. [Rust] We're talking about a limited resource that's scarce, almost rare, to begin with. And then when you go out and try to extract great quantities of bark, from a limited

resource, you are taking far more than is being replenished. [male] It, it may be one of the oldest symbols that mankind had in that,I think, because of its somber appearance and the fact that it's evergreen and it has bright red berries, and the fact that it's deadly poisonous, combine to make it a tree of immortality. [bird song] [Gwyneth] Centuries ago the yew was revered as a symbol of life and death. For one thing, the tree itself can live for thousands of years, and yet virtually every part of the yew is deadly. the needles, the limbs, the bark -- it's all poisonous. Extracting that lifesaving chemical from the yew tree's bark is not something you can do at home. Here in Warrington, Pennsylvania, chemists work for six or seven months in a specialized laboratory removing Taxol from yew bark. It's a complex process. It takes a whole roomful of bark to get less than a handful of Taxol. [male]If this particular drug shows promise, they're going to have to have appreciable quantities of it. They're not going to just

go around chopping trees down. They'll put a very valued effort to synthesizing the [unclear] they have exact structure of the molecule in the laboratory, rather than to have to go and extract it from bark, which is a very laborious process. [Gwyneth] For more than five years Dr. Robert Holton has been trying to duplicate Taxol in his laboratory at Florida State University. If he's able to make a synthetic replica, we may not have to rely on the yew bark. But Holton believes he may be at least two years away from doing nature one better. [Bolton] We're close to preparing a simpler, naturally occurring compound, which is not active against cancer; but the root which we use to make it, should let us prepare Taxol. [Gwyneth] Funding for his research has been especially slow. Most of the dollars have come from the federal government. Private companies Holton says will probably jump on the bandwagon when his research is nearer completion. But that may not be soon enough. If tests on humans are successful, the demand for Taxol could quickly outstrip the supply of yew bark.

[Pat?]There isn't enough bark in all of Oregon to treat more than a few thousand patients at the most. And we all know that there are hundreds of thousands of cancer victims. [male]I think if the last yew tree, would, [?] the last yew tree is cut down to save your mother and father that possibly don't have cancer. What have we lost I think we've gained a lot. [Pat?] It seems a little brash, I think, to come in and waste the whole entire species for, for these times. I think that we should have a little longer range vision. [Gwyneth] But long range vision doesn't come easily to the human species. Our individual lifetimes run less than even 100 years each. It's hard for us to relate to a tree that's got a potential for thousands of years of life, hard to see beyond our own immediate needs. For centuries the yew has been known as a tree of immortality. The question in this century is, what will mankind do with that secret.

[male]A key point that we want to emphasize, and that is testing of Taxol in humans is still in the very early stages. Scientists are still investigating all of the possible side effects. [Gwyneth?] Our next story brings to mind images of the Old West. There are wild horses roaming the open spaces of eastern Oregon. But federal law says that this horse population has to be controlled. Reporter Vivian Candeny went along at roundup time. [Vivian] I like the Skull creek herd. Let's take it as an example, because this is the herd we're working with today. It's the largest wild horse herd here in Oregon, and the minimum levels are a hundred fifty six head. And the maximum levels I think are about two hundred fifty to 260 head. And essentially we have we have established what we call management levels during our land use planning process, in almost all these herds. And the minimum level for Oregon is Thirteen hundred

twenty five head for all the herds combined. The maximum level of which. we want to provide for. Collectively, with the 18 herds about is 2550 head to 2600 head. There you go. There's a bunch right there that we'll probably have in a craus [?], hopefully, sometime today. Where is my helicopter? [male] That's quite a show. [Vivian?] We see how the configuration of the trap is set up. So we would trap facing up-canyon. The helicopter will be coming down the draw here off to our right. They'll run down the draw, will gather the horses down there at the mouth of the wing trap. [male] Wild horses of course, ah, do consume what cattle eat and what dear eat, and when they're really, during the hard time of the year in the winter or winter time, they'll eat most anything, including their own manes and tails

to survive. [siren sound] They'll turn the [fire/five horses...[unclear] as soon as the wild horses cross the hump. And with our fingers crossed, a bridled [?] horse will come up, lead them into the wing trap,. and then the old blocked off the two wings of the trap with a cable with a burlap bag on it [male] It's obvious that horses need to be controlled. We don't have large native predators that would eat the horses; the horses are non-native to the area. They're very adaptable and successful in the inner mountain west. [woman] And the two guys on the horses down there, what are they gonna do? [male] Two guys on the horses are going to make sure the horses don't come back and go down the canyon. They'll do one of three things. They'll either bolt when they get out of this canyon, or, one of four things, scatter. Or they'll get down here and all of a sudden sense something's wrong. And then they'll blow up and try to get back under the helicopter, back up to the country they came from. [woman] I don't see allowing unlimited breeding out there and leaving horses out there. They do have to be

kept at a controlled level, but when you're at that control level there is no reason that those horses should be competing that heavily against the wildlife. And if there is a problem between the wildlife, the horses, and the cattle, then let's face it -- the cattle need to come off. [male]They'll go down-canyon where, if they go down-canyon, we've lost them, where everything works according to Hoyle, to follow the [unclear] horse back up here to the trap. Once they get here they're essentially captured, then they'll go ahead and put them in the holding corral, and as soon as they get a truckload we're bailing out here today. [unclear dialog] ...going to have to roll forward a little bit. [woman]These are Oregon's wild horses, horses that are free to run on our public lands. It's been the job of the Bureau of Land Management to control wild horse herds since 1971. That's when Congress passed the wild free-roaming horse and burro act. The herds increase about 10 to 20 percent a year, so every two to five years it's time for a round-up. The

gathering of wild horses used to be a lot harder for Josh Warburton. [Josh] Early in the program, When also the law was passed and then BLM overnight essentially inherited. This resource. We didn't have any idea what we were supposed to do with it. All we knew is you couldn't harass them. You couldn't gather for commercial purpose any more, and it was a new responsibility. And so there for a few years we fumbled around and we couldn't use aircraft. So try to round wild horses in this kind of country strictly with a bunch of wranglers and volunteers on horseback. You didn't cut it. So the animals kept increasing. and there was a point in time that you bet there was conflict between livestock, big game, and non-game and horses. [woman] This Jordan Valley Ranch is both a home and a livelihood for Bob Skinner. [Bob] My great grandfather started the place in 1978 and

our family's been here ever since. We have about eight thousand acres of deeded land and then of course we have our BLM permit on top of that. [woman] Bob's business is beef but his cattle the deer antelope and sometimes wild horses graze on the public lands he leases from the BLM. He wants less competition for the forage. [Bob]Over-grazing by horses is more detrimental than any other animal I know of. [woman]Don Trion's with the Oregon Natural Resources Council; its members are special interest groups, like the hunters the fisherman and other outdoor types. He cares about how the horses and cows can ruin the land. [Don] I'm not so concerned with livestock grazing simply because there are some cow pies [pods?] on the public land. I'm concerned with it because the history of over-grazing by horses and by livestock, and sometimes, you know, in the 1950s, we had very large big game herds that sometimes seriously damaged some of the ranges. [male voices] This here calls.... [unclear]

[woman] This wild horse corral in Burns is the only adoption facility in Oregon. Ron Harding matches up wild horses with people like Frank and Ann Rodda. It costs one hundred twenty five dollars to adopt a wild horse, and after a year they'll own a colt and a filly. [Frank] We had a little burro from the BLM over at Susanville. We've had good luck with her so we thought we ought to try the horses. They need homes. Let's go buddy. [male] OK Tom? ..... you guide this rope and I'll shut the gate behind her .... [woman] The wild horses that don't find a home are sent to holding corrals like this one in Lovelock, Nevada. Price about two dollars and fifty cents a day to feed each of the over 10,000 penned-up horses. But in April of 1987 the BLM proposed some changes in the current law. They want to run the old, infirmed horses through a public auction and destroy the unadoptable

ones after 90 days. [woman]When you say public auctions what would happen to the horses? [woman]A lot of them would go for meat. But If you have a public auction it gives the person who doesn't want to go to the facility and go through that, the chance to buy the horse through the auction, and that gives the horse one last chance to go to a home before he has to go for meat [woman] These wild horses on Beatty's Butte are the forerunners of a radical experiment a few years ago the BLM issued a feasibility study on sterilizing the herds dominant stallions. 15 studs were radio tagged and given vasectomies. Birth control costs about $500 a horse. [male]That's a poor way to control because in the first place it's an ongoing thing. Every animal, every animal you wanted to treat certainly has to be handled. and there is really no way to

handle them very gently. [male]We make a lot of investments in the public land and I know we could we could pay for the wild horse program for a long long time. So the current situation in this scenario is pretty clear. And unless we're willing to support that kind of program we've got to look for something that is a little more effective, and a little more cost effective. [woman] would birth control matter? [unclear] is not out of the question. [male] I don't think birth control is out of the question on an over-horse population. [woman] Later this year Congress will vote on the public auction provision suggested by the BLM. But the 1988 appropriation bill doesn't allow the BLM to kill unadoptable wild horses. So for now the original 1971 Act remains intact. [male] It's the wild horses running, the... many people like to see that, [unclear] running through their in manes blowing in the wind. And it really was near and dear to the public's heart. [woman] During the next

fiscal year. Oregon will get more federal money to expand the horse round up. [male/host] And that means that more horses will be put up for adoption or kept in a holding corrals to maintain control of the wild horse population. Well our last story tonight is about young children, a subject that always sparks a wide range of opinions. And Steve Aimen, our modern day misanthrope, says he came up with this story idea after spending a warm night with family and friends. [Steve] Children! Herbert Hoover once called them our most valuable natural resource. But that was a long time ago before there were so many of them. And whatever happened to the adage that the little darlings should be seen and not heard [woman] We already broke it. [laughs.] [Steve] Here's an all too common scene friends getting together only to form a circle then spend the next six hours watching the children play. The only thing encouraging about a display like this is that the roughians may wear themselves out.

Now this is a pretty picture and so is this a deserted sofa in a quiet room. It gives one the opportunity to reflect on the single life and its many advantages. "It's show time." [voices, laughter] Thanks to modern technology little cherubs don't even have to be around to monopolize our attention. We can now see them preserved forever in living color, and unlike film, video tape is cheap. Why you can get two whole hours of action like this for only a couple of dollars. At least this keeps the proud parents glued to the tube so people like me can slip away and pretend to be interested in, oh, say, a collection of Time-Life Books.

[woman]There you are. I've got a few pictures for you to see. Sit down. Look at these. Here's Nick when he was just a little guy. Isn't he cute? And here you see his first airplane ride when he was three months old. Can you believe it! It was great. Here he is in baby pictures. [Steve] Baby pictures -- a growing problem of international proportions. They're cheap, portable, and parents don't need any fancy equipment to show them off -- and show them off, they do -- to anyone at any place at any time. Now tell me the truth. Only a parent would keep a picture like this right. Or this. You know I really wouldn't mind looking at the pictures if I could just figure out what or who it is I'm looking at. [woman] Hi there Mr. B. [Steve] And that's where Rebecca Phoenix comes in. She's considered one of the nation's best children's portrait specialists working for Sears. She photographs about 4,000 children a year. Of course, they do it a little differently now. [machine sound] Now we're talking high tech photography with the new video vision camera complete with

remote control and a TV monitor. With equipment like this and reputation to match, I figured Rebecca would be just the person to help. [woman] Oh, that was pretty. [Steve] You know baby pictures will always be around. So the trick is to give the parents some tips that will make them as attractive as possible. [woman] That's absolutely wonderful, a real pleasure to photograph. [Steve?] But what can they do to make sure those pictures are palatable for someone like me? [Rebecca] I think the first thing to do is to relax. That way the child is going to be more relaxed too. And you're just going to have a much better expression and better picture in the end. Who's a pretty girl who's a pretty girl aboo aboo, [etc.] Good. She's all done. If you're photographing a person you want the person to fill most of the frame. If you're photographing a small child on the other hand just make sure that the clothes are pulled down that the diapers are tucked. That the clothing isn't all rumpled up

on them. [Steve] Is there a better time of day to take a picture of a baby? [Rebecca]The best time of day for the child, for any child, is after they've been fed and they've had a nap. And their diapers are changed that they're feeling comfortable. [camera sound] Oh, perfect! Absolutely perfect. Couldn't asked you to do any better on that. [Steve] It's amazing what you can get when you know what you're doing. But I should warn you, working with Rebecca does have its drawbacks. [Rebecca] I'm a parent too, and so I love the opportunity to whip out my little wallet sized portraits and and to show those off, to skip backward, because we could go with so many, and this is my little boy at four months, this is Jordan. I love to put hats on him. Of course we have him in some different poses such as the Popeye pose here, that he came up with all by himself [laughs] and then we go back to three months. [male] Well, no wonder Steve had that glazed look when he returned from doing this story. [female] That's very true but if you really want to hear someone ramble on and on. Just ask

Steve to show you pictures of his family. Buddy and Charlie they're his dogs. I guess we all have our pictures to bear. male host]And yes we do. Coming up next on Front Street Oregon's memorial to America's most controversial war. It's been more than a decade since the last U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam. Now the friends and relatives of those who didn't come back alive are hoping the Oregon Vietnam Memorial can help them find peace. [woman host] And we'll profile the man responsible for the words on that Vietnam Memorial. It's Terrence O'Donnell. Thanks for joining us tonight. We'll see you next time. Good night. Good night. Lord. ?