A clear look at the wonder of nature

AS Alice in Wonderland said, things gets “curiouser and curioser” and she was “so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English”.

Alice might well have been tongue-tied had she come across the see-through goldfish which a correspondent tells me Japanese scientists have recently developed to follow the see-through frogs developed in 2007. This planet, always a wonderland of nature, now, more than ever, becomes a wonderland of science too.

Transparent frogs were developed in order to preclude the blood-and-guts dissection of frogs in schools, and the taking of frogs from the wild for that purpose. These specially-bred frogs, kept in vivariums and taken out for biology class, would save schools the cost of buying frogs while letting students observe organs, blood vessels and eggs under the skin without employing scalpels. Also, as their developer, Professor Masayuki Sumida at Hiroshima University’s Institute for Amphibian Biology, says “Transparent frogs make it easier and cheaper to observe the development and progress of cancer, the growth and aging of internal organs, and the effects of chemicals on organs.”