The 36 trees planted last week at Boutwells Landing senior living community in Oak Park Heights have a big job: To help revitalize the state’s elm population.

The American elm trees, each about 2 years old and 4 to 6 feet tall, were cloned by University of Minnesota researchers to be resistant to Dutch elm disease, a fungal disease that killed millions of elm trees around the world.

In the late 1970s, there were 1.3 million American elms with diameters greater than 21 inches in Minnesota. Dutch elm disease killed 95 percent of them, leaving behind fewer than 60,000 big elms, according to U researchers.

Ryan Murphy and Ben Held, co-investigators on the U’s disease-resistant elm selection and reintroduction program, want to revive the population. On May 16, they got some help from Boutwells Landing residents David Lime, 84, and Neal Kingsley, 87, both U.S. Forest Service veterans, who participated in the three-hour planting project.

Soon after Lime moved to Boutwells Landing three years ago, he pitched the idea of starting a nursery in the southeast corner of the 100-acre property to help offset the loss of ash trees from emerald ash borer.

Boutwells Landing officials expressed interest, and Lime, who worked for 20 years in the Forest Service’s experiment station on the St. Paul campus and later taught at the U’s College of Forestry, started looking for places giving away trees and people who were researching trees “where we could invite them to plant some trees on our property,” he said.

Lime connected with Kingsley, and the two met with Rob Venette, director of the Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center at the U of M and research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Northern Research Station. He connected them with Murphy and Held.

“It was just one of those things where they had space, and we were looking for places, and it just was the right connection,” Murphy said.

Hardy elms survived

Dutch elm disease is caused by a fungus that can be spread by a bark beetle or through two trees that have interconnected roots. Beetles reared in infected trees emerge from the diseased wood carrying spores, which they then deposit into healthy trees by feeding on the young twigs. The fungus triggers reactions that block the tree’s vascular system, which prevents it from getting water and nutrients normally, and it becomes wilted, leading to rapid death, Murphy said.

Fortunately, Dutch elm disease didn’t kill every elm tree in the state. Some very hardy “survivor” elms were left behind.

“Oftentimes, they’re the only elm tree left in an area where everything else has died,” Murphy said.

Said Venette: “It’s just a matter of a random mutation that happens to occur in these trees. In general, the species as a whole is highly susceptible, but it’s just these very lucky individual (trees) that have natural resistance.”

Researchers are using the “survivor” elms from around the state – identified by forestry officials, arborists and private landowners – to grow Dutch elm disease-resistant trees.

Here’s how it works: Researchers visit the “survivor” elm in the wintertime and take the branch tips and then grow a tree genetically identical to that elm. “You take that tissue from that twig, and you graft it onto a rootstock,” said Murphy, who also manages the U of M’s Urban Forestry Outreach & Research Lab, which provides education about trees to communities around the state.

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The cloned trees are then planted back in the landscape either at the St. Paul campus or at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chanhassen “to confirm that they really are resistant, and that they weren’t just lucky and got missed by the bark beetles,” Venette said.

Once the tree is propagated, it can take five to seven years to get to a size where it can be inoculated with the pathogen, Murphy said.

“We then drill a hole into the main stem of the tree, inject the tree with concentrated spores of the fungus which causes the disease, and wait to see its effect,” he said. “To find one resistant cultivar, it could easily take 10 years.”

If the tree survives inoculation with the fungus, researchers will then propagate more of them and plant those at different test sites around the state “because we have more evidence to suggest that they are truly resistant,” he said.

Multiple sites

Robert Venette, from left, Ben Held, Ryan Murphy, Kyle Rue, Johannes Dufault and Neal Kingsley gather to plant elm trees in a field at Boutwells Landing senior living community in Oak Park Heights on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Courtesy of Boutwells Landing)

The resistant elms are being planted at Boutwells Landing, Nerstrand Big Woods State Park, Elm Creek Park Reserve and in the Minnesota River Valley.

Researchers plan yearly follow-up visits to assess the tree performance; the trees are expected to grow several feet each year, Murphy said.

Fifteen more trees will be planted in a forested area at Boutwells Landing that was impacted by emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that attacks and kills ash trees. Ash trees were planted in many urban forests in Minnesota to replace elm trees decimated by Dutch elm disease, Venette said.

“It’s all part of growing a more diversified urban forest,” he said. “We’ve nearly come full circle.”

The research project at Boutwells Landing is expected to last somewhere between five and 10 years “because we really are trying to understand how well these trees get established and what factors might be affecting their survival and growth,” Venette said.

The $226,000 research project, funded by the Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center, started in January 2024. An earlier U of M research project on developing Dutch-elm resistant trees received $234,000 in funding from the center and was completed in 2023. The center was formed in 2014 to coordinate the U’s research into invasive insects and land-based plants. It is funded by the state’s Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources. The center, which has four employees, has an annual budget of $330,000.

Engaging people in science

Officials were thrilled when Murphy and Held proposed the project, said Heather Koop, the Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center’s associate program director.

“When we can get a piece of research to that point of implementation, that’s the gold standard for us … that’s how we really like to measure our success,” she said. “So often we see research that is done that never really gets to that next stage. Because this is all publicly funded, we feel very strongly that this research needs to be in the public realm, and people need to understand it and how to use it. Hopefully, they’ll apply it, and hopefully, we’ll see better management options available for different invasive species.”

Another plus: The project “engages people in science,” she said. “You have these folks who are super-eager to help us out, and that just makes me really happy.”

In addition to having a few retired foresters, Boutwells Landing has “a very rich community of folks who are interested in science,” Venette said. “They reached out and asked about opportunities to engage in collaborative work related to trees, and we just happen to have this project that was a nice fit.”

Researchers worked with teens from the Green Crew, the youth program of the Izaak Walton League’s Minnesota Valley chapter, to plant trees in Bloomington on Earth Day 2023, so it was fitting to work with seniors on the Boutwells Landing project, Venette said. “It really shows the breadth of interest in this kind of work,” he said.

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Lime, who walks or drives past the new trees at least once a day, said the project is giving staff and residents at Boutwells Landing a chance “to learn about the role of science in helping solve serious natural-resource problems” and how they can help bring American elm trees back to the Minnesota and Upper Midwest landscape, he said.

“The idea is that if we can re-establish them in Minnesota, maybe we can do it in other states,” Kingsley said. “Bringing them back would be great because they were beautiful.”

Although Kingsley knows he may not be around to see whether the experiment was a success, he said he is happy to have played a part.

“My grandfather built fishing schooners, and I remember as a kid growing up seeing a ship that my grandfather helped build,” he said. “It was nice. Maybe my grandkids or great-grandkids will say, ‘See that tree? Bamp helped plant that.’ That would be kind of nice.”

Amy Lindgren

We’ve all heard the lament: Jobs go to those with experience but you can’t get experience without a job.

But is it true? While the first half of the complaint is largely accurate – jobs do more frequently go to those with experience – the second part can be misleading. It’s not the related job that’s required, but applicable ability.

Try this version instead: Jobs go to those with experience and you can get experience by doing related tasks.

The difference between the two concepts is foundational. In the first, you have the image of a Mobius strip, or perhaps a snake swallowing its tail. That is, a circle without end. But in the second concept, you’re invited to imagine what tasks are relevant to the work you seek and then conduct those tasks to build needed experience.

Let’s break that down for someone wishing to break into a new field – perhaps a new graduate or a career-changer or a caretaker re-entering the workforce. You’ll need some steps to analyze the problem before solving it:

1. Choose a job target. We’ll use nonprofit communications for this example.

2. Research to learn (and list) the typical duties. Here’s what came from a recent batch of job postings for the duties of a nonprofit communications person: Strong writing ability; newsletter and web content; social media posting/monitoring; website management; writing/editing press releases; building external relationships for the organization; grant writing; creating training materials; etc.

Most jobs wouldn’t demand all of these duties, but the variety gives you a sense of what the job primarily consists of. Not surprisingly, that would be communications.

3. Match your own skills and experience to the list. Put a mark next to the duties you’ve conducted before, whether that was in a job, for a class, as a volunteer, or just on your own.

You’ll need to prove your ability for these areas, so now’s the time to gather up the evidence. Perhaps you’ve written newsletter articles for your house of worship, or build relationships between your student club and college administration. Put everything into computer files on your desktop or file folders on your actual desk, easily accessible when it’s time to write your résumé.

4. Look for the gaps between the job duties and your own background. The second time through the list of duties, you’ll be using a different symbol or color to mark the communications job tasks you haven’t done before. These are areas where you need to gain experience and build skills.

So those are the problem-analysis steps. What if you discover a complete lack of skills or related experience for the job you desire? That’s when you’ll need a bridge that takes you from zero to the minimum needed by the average employer. For most people, that bridge would be some kind of hands-on, immersive experience such as an internship, certificate program, volunteer gig or part-time job.

On the other hand, your analysis could reveal that you have some good experience but not in all the areas. In that case, you’ll need a plan to fill the gaps. For example, suppose one gap is a lack of website management – how can you develop this ability? You probably have an idea already, but some of the possibilities include taking a class, using tutorials to build/maintain a site for a small nonprofit or startup, asking a friend to teach you, or requesting to cross-train on this function if you’re working in a job now.

Time for a recap. So far, you’ve chosen a target job, analyzed the job’s usual duties and the skills needed to do them, reviewed your own skills and experiences, identified the things you can do/have done before, and identified the things you can’t do, while making a partial plan for learning to do them.

Not too shabby, as my dad used to say. Now here’s the baseline question: How badly do you want to break into this field? Assuming it’s at least a 50-50 in terms of your interest, you’re ready for the home stretch. It’s time to build a résumé touting the skills you do have while starting on the plan for getting the other skills. In both categories, remember the power of examples. You’ll be more convincing if you create online and print portfolios to share with prospective employers during your interviews.

Come back next week for more ideas to break the no-experience-no-job cycle.

Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

Events memorializing the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd include, this weekend, concerts, prayer services, moments of silence, art displays, a dance and candlelight vigils. Of at least a dozen events on this Memorial Day weekend of solicitude and celebration, at least six are to be held at George Floyd Square, at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis.

In fact, on the night itself, May 25, there will be a gospel concert followed by a candlelight vigil at George Floyd Square.

It’s been five years, five long years, certainly an acceptable duration of public grief. And yet one thing has been forgotten, one crucial element forgotten over the five long years of institutionalizing the memory of Floyd.

A can of paint.

Not a single example of aesthetic pleasantry has come to that intersection. The adult political children and professional activists who run Minneapolis have burned through millions of taxpayer dollars on planning. Planning what? You haven’t accomplished anything. Neighbors have been heard — “leave us alone” — and then ignored. Barricades come and go. Graffiti is the common language, as is a malignant idleness so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife. What businesses remain have apparently just run out of options, and they hang on, tired and careworn.

In the early days, the square was run like a protection racket by self-appointed kingpins. Say the magic word and you could get past the sawhorse gate. But it was merely an entrance to a dystopian nightmare of disfunction. Police were eyed with contempt. Rules for the corrupt ghost town were made up on the spot and changed just as quickly. There was no order and no apparent goals.

Evidenced by the lack of paint.

If Floyd was to be truly respected, there would be paint. There would have been scrubbing and polishing and power washing until the concrete sparkled. If the memory of the man is supposed to point to a worldwide revolution in policing, you would think that such a milestone might be marked by more than litter and gutters full of dirty rain water.

George Floyd Square is an embarrassment, to Floyd, to the residents near it and to the citizens of the Twin Cities who expect more and continue to get less.

First of all, it isn’t a square. Why not make it one? Thus, the paint. Five long years of city council committees and hearings and listening sessions and political activists walking around with their iPads and their latest pedestrian mall brainstorm. And then all you got was something from a song, another day longer and deeper in debt.

The original sin happened five years ago when the city was alight with rioting and destruction. The mayor and his like-minded ideologues from the governor on down let a police precinct burn and stores get looted. They had trouble reaching for the phone to call the National Guard. They certainly weren’t intending to demand that rioters behave. After all, we were told those were peaceful protests.

The powers that be had neither the courage nor the intelligence to put a stop to the Wild West shenanigans at 38th and Chicago. They just let it go and it’s still going, going, gone.

A square suggests sidewalk tables and shade trees. A respite, a place of quietude and reflection, usually found in the middle pockets of sprawling cities.

But not here. Here we have the stain of ineptitude and malfeasance passed off as some sort of virtue.

None of the ideologues are capable of embarrassment or shame. And that leaves the man they hide behind memorialized by nothing more than litter and dirty rain water in the gutter.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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By Jackie Fortiér and Arthur Allen, KFF Health News

In the dim basement of a Salt Lake City pharmacy, hundreds of amber-colored plastic pill bottles sit stacked in rows, one man’s defensive wall in a tariff war.

Independent pharmacist Benjamin Jolley and his colleagues worry that the tariffs, aimed at bringing drug production to the United States, could instead drive companies out of business while raising prices and creating more of the drug shortages that have plagued American patients for several years.

Jolley bought six months’ worth of the most expensive large bottles, hoping to shield his business from the 10% across-the-board tariffs on imported goods that President Donald Trump announced April 2. Now with threats of additional tariffs targeting pharmaceuticals, Jolley worries that costs will soar for the medications that will fill those bottles.

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In principle, Jolley said, using tariffs to push manufacturing from China and India to the U.S. makes sense. In the event of war, China could quickly stop all exports to the United States.

“I understand the rationale for tariffs. I’m not sure that we’re gonna do it the right way,” Jolley said. “And I am definitely sure that it’s going to raise the price that I pay my suppliers.”

Squeezed by insurers and middlemen, independent pharmacists such as Jolley find themselves on the front lines of a tariff storm. Nearly everyone down the line — drugmakers, pharmacies, wholesalers, and middlemen — opposes most tariffs.

Slashing drug imports could trigger widespread shortages, experts said, because of America’s dependence on Chinese- and Indian-made chemical ingredients, which form the critical building blocks of many medicines. Industry officials caution that steep tariffs on raw materials and finished pharmaceuticals could make drugs more expensive.

“Big ships don’t change course overnight,” said Robin Feldman, a UC Law San Francisco professor who writes about prescription drug issues. “Even if companies pledge to bring manufacturing home, it will take time to get them up and running. The key will be to avoid damage to industry and pain to consumers in the process.”

Trump on April 8 said he would soon announce “a major tariff on pharmaceuticals,” which have been largely tariff-free in the U.S. for 30 years.

“When they hear that, they will leave China,” he said. The U.S. imported $213 billion worth of medicines in 2024 — from China but also India, Europe, and other areas.

Prescription drugs sit ready to be distributed to patients at 986 Pharmacy in Alhambra, California. ((Jackie Fortiér/KFF Health News)/KFF Health News/TNS)

Trump’s statement sent drugmakers scrambling to figure out whether he was serious, and whether some tariffs would be levied more narrowly, since many parts of the U.S. drug supply chain are fragile, drug shortages are common, and upheaval at the FDA leaves questions about whether its staffing is adequate to inspect factories, where quality problems can lead to supply chain crises.

On May 12, Trump signed an executive order asking drugmakers to bring down the prices Americans pay for prescriptions, to put them in line with prices in other countries.

Meanwhile, pharmacists predict even the 10% tariffs Trump has demanded will hurt: Jolley said a potential increase of up to 30 cents a vial is not a king’s ransom, but it adds up when you’re a small pharmacy that fills 50,000 prescriptions a year.

“The one word that I would say right now to describe tariffs is ‘uncertainty,’” said Scott Pace, a pharmacist and owner of Kavanaugh Pharmacy in Little Rock, Arkansas.

To weather price fluctuations, Pace stocked up on the drugs his pharmacy dispenses most.

“I’ve identified the top 200 generics in my store, and I have basically put 90 days’ worth of those on the shelf just as a starting point,” he said. “Those are the diabetes drugs, the blood pressure medicines, the antibiotics — those things that I know folks will be sicker without.”

Pace said tariffs could be the death knell for the many independent pharmacies that exist on “razor-thin margins” — unless reimbursements rise to keep up with higher costs.

Unlike other retailers, pharmacies can’t pass along such costs to patients. Their payments are set by health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers largely owned by insurance conglomerates, who act as middlemen between drug manufacturers and purchasers.

Neal Smoller, who employs 15 people at his Village Apothecary in Woodstock, New York, is not optimistic.

“It’s not like they’re gonna go back and say, well, here’s your 10% bump because of the 10% tariff,” he said. “Costs are gonna go up and then the sluggish responses from the PBMs — they’re going to lead us to lose more money at a faster rate than we already are.”

Smoller, who said he has built a niche selling vitamins and supplements, fears that FDA firings will mean fewer federal inspections and safety checks.

“I worry that our pharmaceutical industry becomes like our supplement industry, where it’s the wild West,” he said.

Pills sit in the tray of a pill-counting machine at 986 Pharmacy in Alhambra, California. ((Jackie Fortiér/KFF Health News)/KFF Health News/TNS)

Narrowly focused tariffs might work in some cases, said Marta Wosińska, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on Health Policy. For example, while drug manufacturing plants can cost $1 billion and take three to five years to set up, it would be relatively cheap to build a syringe factory — a business American manufacturers abandoned during the covid-19 pandemic because China was dumping its products here, Wosińska said.

It’s not surprising that giants such as Novartis and Eli Lilly have promised Trump they’ll invest billions in U.S. plants, she said, since much of their final drug product is made here or in Europe, where governments negotiate drug prices. The industry is using Trump’s tariff saber-rattling as leverage; in an April 11 letter, 32 drug companies demanded European governments pay them more or face an exodus to the United States.

Brandon Daniels, CEO of supply chain company Exiger, is bullish on tariffs. He thinks they could help bring some chemical manufacturing back to the U.S., which, when coupled with increased use of automation, would reduce the labor advantages of China and India.

“You’ve got real estate in North Texas that’s cheaper than real estate in Shenzhen,” he said at an economic conference April 25 in Washington, referring to a major Chinese chemical manufacturing center.

But Wosińska said no amount of tariffs will compel makers of generic drugs, responsible for 90% of U.S. prescriptions, to build new factories in the U.S. Payment structures and competition would make it economic suicide, she said.

Several U.S. generics firms have declared bankruptcy or closed U.S. factories over the past decade, said John Murphy, CEO of the Association for Accessible Medicines, the generics trade group. Reversing that trend won’t be easy and tariffs won’t do it, he said.

“There’s not a magic level of tariffs that magically incentivizes them to come into the U.S.,” he said. “There is no room to make a billion-dollar investment in a domestic facility if you’re going to lose money on every dose you sell in the U.S. market.”

His group has tried to explain these complexities to Trump officials, and hopes word is getting through. “We’re not PhRMA,” Murphy said, referring to the powerful trade group primarily representing makers of brand-name drugs. “I don’t have the resources to go to Mar-a-Lago to talk to the president myself.”

Many of the active ingredients in American drugs are imported. Fresenius Kabi, a German company with facilities in eight U.S. states to produce or distribute sterile injectables — vital hospital drugs for cancer and other conditions — complained in a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer that tariffs on these raw materials could paradoxically lead some companies to move finished product manufacturing overseas.

Fresenius Kabi also makes biosimilars, the generic forms of expensive biologic drugs such as Humira and Stelara. The United States is typically the last developed country where biosimilars appear on the market because of patent laws.

Tariffs on biosimilars coming from overseas — where Fresenius makes such drugs — would further incentivize U.S. use of more expensive brand-name biologics, the March 11 letter said. Biosimilars, which can cost a tenth of the original drug’s price, launch on average 3-4 years later in the U.S. than in Canada or Europe.

In addition to getting cheaper knockoff drugs faster, European countries also pay far less than the United States for brand-name products. Paradoxically, Murphy said, those same countries pay more for generics.

European governments tend to establish more stable contracts with makers of generics, while in the United States, “rabid competition” drives down prices to the point at which a manufacturer “maybe scrimps on product quality,” said John Barkett, a White House Domestic Policy Council member in the Biden administration.

As a result, Wosińska said, “without exemptions or other measures put in place, I really worry about tariffs causing drug shortages.”

Smoller, the New York pharmacist, doesn’t see any upside to tariffs.

“How do I solve the problem of caring for my community,” he said, “but not being subject to the emotional roller coaster that is dispensing hundreds of prescriptions a day and watching every single one of them be a loss or 12 cents profit?”

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.