All of those that prefer not to have frogs dissected for science may have just won the battle of observation. In Japan, frogs have been genetically altered to give them clear skin.
Why?
The lead researcher for the project was Masayuki Sumida, a professor at the Institute for Amphibian Biology of state-run Hiroshima University explained the project‘s purpose.
“You can see through the skin how organs grow, how cancer starts and develops. You can watch organs of the same frog over its entire life as you don’t have to dissect it. The researcher can also observe how toxins affect bones, livers and other organs at lower costs.”
Frog dissections have become increasingly unpopular due to the cruelty of the procedure. This new way of looking at frogs is a breakthrough against the old way of dissecting.
How?
How they produced such an unusual creature is very interesting. They took a rare mutant Japanese brown frog. They then increased the recessive genes that were known to create pale frogs.
When the scientists of Sumida’s team artificially inseminated two frogs, the offspring still had a normal appearance. But when they then crossed the offspring, it produced the see-through skin. And from the point of tadpole on, they are see-through. Many interesting changes were observed inside these tadpoles as they developed into grown frogs.
The Laws of Nature
These transparent frogs could live in the wild, but the chance that so many recessive genes could be inherited is practically impossible without this genetic altering from an outside source.
And although these amphibians can reproduce offspring to resemble them, the generation after that die in a very short time period. The researchers believe that embodying two sets of recessive genes is what causes their deaths. Obviously, the Laws of Nature do not allow this unnatural state in genes to continue for very long.
