Like a lot of people my age, I grew up with the World Book Encyclopedia. (My family wasn’t smart enough for The Britannica.) When I was in the second grade, my older sister Sally was doing a report on Antarctica... or Alaska…or anteaters... or... or...Okay, I can’t remember, but what I do remember is picking up the A-volume of the World Book that she had left on the sofa and thumbing through it to discover entries on airplanes and then automobiles. I mean, everything I would ever need to know for my entire life was in these books! Over the summer between my second and third grade years, I would peruse all of the pictures and a few of the words of the entire set.
And that’s how I came to discover: In the 1962 World Book, there were two organisms worthy of being illustrated with several transparent pages layered one onto another to show the organisms’ innards. One was the human body – a male (sans genitalia, of course) and the other was the frog.
When that had come clear to me, I knew I needed to make further scientific inquiry, so I took the F-volume to my mom and asked her, “Why do we only get to see the insides of people and frogs?”
She said, “Right. The frog. That’s a guide so you can dissect it.”
I asked her, “What does dissect it mean?” She lowered her ever-present novel and looked at me over her chained-around-her-neck glasses. I saw her eyes light up in that particular way that told me that she was proud of my curiosity. But her face shifted and she gave a sigh, followed by her mouth going closed and flat. And then it came, that maddening parental cop-out answer, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Now, in my latter years, I respect why my mother withheld scientific information. As anyone who grew up around me knows, I was a feral child, equipped with a Cub Scout pocket knife. My mom was concerned that I might attempt frog dissection down at the creek without proper adult supervision.
And so it came to pass, when I was older, in the upper grades of our very own Newton County School System, part of my education was to disembody a worm, a fetal pig, and a frog.
• • •
And speaking of people who know the ins and outs of frogs…
Kseniia Petrova is a highly regarded Russian-born biomedical research scientist who began working at Harvard University in 2023. Her boss, Leon Peshkin, a principal research scientist in Harvard’s department of systems biology, had been looking for a scientist like Ms. Petrova for more than a year to study cell division in the eggs of the Xenopus frogs. I’ll skip a lot of scientificy details only to say that their research aims to find ways to alleviate Alzheimer’s and cancer, among other studies. As it turns out, Ms. Petrova is the leading expert in the use of the Harvard-invented Normalized Raman Imaging – or NoRi – microscope. She is highly regarded among her co-workers at Harvard, who have described her as possessing “a gifted mind” and one whose “dedication to her work borders on the obsessive.” One of her colleagues, William Trim, a postdoctoral fellow, said, “Any problem I have with data, she has a solution.”
Ms. Petrova left her native Russia because funding for her research was squelched by the government. (Sound familiar?) Russia’s war with Ukraine has proven to be expensive. And yes, Ms. Petrova had been arrested for protesting Russia’s attack on Ukraine. And she has turned down work in Russia because she refuses to stop protesting the regime of Vladimir Putin.
When she was asked about bringing her talents to the US, she said America is “a paradise for science.”
And there it is. The United States has been a leader in scientific research not only because we have the best homegrown innovators, but also because our universities and laboratories create environments where scientists from all over the world want to join us here, a land where they will be respected and valued, where innovation is peer-reviewed, and good science is praised and put to good use.
Kseniia Petrova had been working so hard that Dr. Peshkin was relieved when she announced that she would take a vacation to Europe. He said, “All she did was science... she just spent all day — 14, 15 hours — tweaking the flow rates of five tubes that all coalesce into one place to get this cell into a droplet.”
Her travel plans included visiting with other Russian expatriate scientists scattered throughout Europe. She was planning to attend a concert by the pianist Andras Schiff. She had tickets to the theatre. You know, vacationy stuff. Before returning to the United States, Dr. Peshkin asked her to swing by a sister lab in Paris, the Institut Curie Centre de Recherche, and pick up some thinly sliced Xenopus frog embryos. This lab has folks who are particularly skilled at slicing embryonic samples thinner than anybody. And if you’ve ever seen a French chef skilled with a knife, you get it.
Yes, the Harvard lab had tried to have the samples shipped over, but those pesky frozen embryos thawed during the journey.
On February 16, upon returning to the U.S. from Paris, Ms. Petrova failed to declare her sliced Xenopus frog embryos at Logan International Airport in Boston. When a petri-dish-sniffing dog alerted the customs officers, she was asked to open her bag. Her biggest concern was over the embryo samples being ruined.
It behooves me to tell you that I was made aware of the plight of Kseniia Petrova by a dear friend who has the good fortune of being a white woman born and raised in Gaithersburg, Maryland. My friend was also returning to the United States from a vacation in France. She forgot to declare a jar of Terrine d’Oie au Monbazillac, which is, as I am sure you know, goose and pork pâté with dried herbs and sweet white wine. My friend was scolded, reprimanded, chastised, rebuked, and worst of all, forced to surrender her highly-prized Terrine d’Oie au Monbazillac.
But the border patrol agent Ms. Petrova encountered canceled her visa on the spot. *POOF!* – she magically and instantly became undocumented. She was arrested and turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Then transported to Vermont for a hearing, where she was not granted bail. Then she was transported to a Louisiana detention facility, where (as of this writing) she remains until her hearing on May 28.
Ms. Petrova has now applied for asylum. She said, “I am afraid the Russian Federation will kill me for protesting against them.”
That is something that is not unprecedented. In Russia, she is considered a “dissident scientist.”
• • •
Since early 2025, at least 1,100 international students have faced deportation threats due to the sudden revocation of their visas and Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) statuses, often without explanation. As a person who has worked a whole lot of years with a whole mess of nerdy, exuberant, and highly intelligent international students, this makes me utterly sick.
Do you recall the 2024 election campaign hullabaloo about immigration, the so-called “invasion” at the border? Human trafficking?... Fentanyl?... Rapists?...all that fear-mongering jazz?
Let us recall what Ms. Petrova was bringing into the United States: Frog embryos...for biomedical research, materials that have been deemed “noninfectious and non-toxic.”
Her potentially lifesaving research at Harvard University has been put on hold.
• • •
Since what I wrote above, we have learned that President Trump wishes to “block current and future international students from attending Harvard University.” How asinine. Judge Allison D. Burroughs has put a temporary restraining order against the edict.
• • •
I was kindly asked by a prominent resident of Covington as to why I chime in on presidential politics. A fair and just question. My answer is, these aren’t issues of presidential politics; these are simply distractions built out of knee-jerked, arbitrary cruelty.
Pay attention.
Andy Offutt Irwin is a storyteller/singer-songwriter/humorist. Come see him this summer in TX, CO, NM, LA, NC, SC, TN, MD, VA. PA, and NY. When he’s home, he’s happy to be in Covington, GA. Argue with him at andy@andyirwin.com.
