Mother Jones
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Darnell lives deep in the basement of a life sciences building at the University of California-Berkeley, in a plastic tub on a row of stainless steel shelves. He is an African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, sometimes called the lab rat of amphibians. Like most of his species, he’s hardy and long-lived, an adept swimmer, a poor crawler, and a voracious eater. He’s a good breeder, too, having produced both children and grandchildren. There is, however, one unusual thing about Darnell.
He’s female.
Thus began Dashka Slater’s feature in the Jan./Feb. 2012 Mother Jones on Tyrone Hayes, the University of California/Berkeley biologist who has done groundbreaking research suggesting that atrazine, a widely used herbicide, can literally change frogs’ gender, even at at tiny exposure levels—a finding atrazine’s maker, Swiss agrichemical giant Syngenta, vigorously denies. This week, Darnell and other frogs under Hayes’ care have suffered another indignity, according to Hayes: he reportedly told The Chronicle of Higher Education (paywall-protected) that the university has cut off funding for his Berkeley lab. “We’re dead in the water,” Hayes told the Chronicle. He is now without funds “needed to pay for basic functional operations, such as the care of test animals,” the magazine reports. The university denies it has taken any action to defund Hayes—a spokesperson “suggested the possibility that he simply ran out of money,” the Chronicle reports.
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