South America was still attached to Africa and dinosaurs had not yet evolved when the first ginkgo trees appeared on Earth some 230 million years ago. Charles Darwin called them living fossils. The plants are so primitive that they do not produce flowers and yet so hardy that one survived the atomic blast that destroyed Hiroshima. The Chinese have venerated the ginkgo's foul-smelling fruit for thousands of years, using it for everything from promoting longevity to increasing sexual endurance. And in the past decade, extract of ginkgo has become one of Europe's most widely prescribed drugs.
But no mention of the...
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