“South Pacific” was one of the first musicals that Chay Yew saw. When he was a child growing up in Singapore, he recalled, “My mom would call me into the living room to watch it with her (on TV).

A photo of a woman standing next to an English yew in Kew Botanic Gardens in London, England. Christine Dell’Amore poses next to an English yew at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London in 2025. A ...

The widely used chemotherapy drug paclitaxel, commonly known as Taxol, was first extracted from the Pacific yew tree in 1963. But while plants have figured out how to manufacture the molecule, for ...