John O'Reilly of the New York Herald Tribune is not only an able newshawk but a good amateur naturalist who spends much of his time nosing around the laboratories of the American Museum of Natural History. One day last week he was watching burly, affable Herpetologist Gladywn Kingsley Noble at work in his clean smock among his pans, tanks and cages on the Museum's sixth floor. He saw Dr. Noble feeding grubs to a small frog which looked exactly as if it had been skinned alive. Its eyes were pink.
"What kind of a frog is that?" inquired Newshawk O'Reilly.
"Why," said Dr. Noble casually, "it's an albino."
"Ever see one before?"
"No," said Dr. Noble, "I never did."
Well aware that Dr. Noble in his time had observed countless thousands of frogs, O'Reilly rushed back to his office, returned to the Museum with his paper's crack photographer, William Zerbe.* While Zerbe took pictures of the albino frog, O'Reilly listened more carefully to Dr. Noble's explanation of the prodigy than he did to the scientist's indulgent prediction that the public would find the creature of little interest.
Next morning the Herald Tribune carried the story on the front page, printed the frog's picture. The creature was an immediate sensation. Reporters and cameramen from, other papers bore down on the Museum in swarms. Although it was a female and Dr. Noble pointed out the obvious fact that it was not white but a pale, faintly rosy yellow, the Press named the frog "Whitey." Picture services dispatched Whitey's likeness throughout the U. S. by airplane, started it across the Atlantic.
Stirred by this furor, the Museum administration had Whitey moved down, from the sixth floor into the main foyer and the majestic company of "Ahnighito," 36½-ton meteorite from Greenland, the regal statue of the Museum's longtime (1881-1908) President Morris Ketchum Jesup, the big scale drawing of Baluchi-therium (TIME, April 8). Although in her informal surroundings upstairs Whitey had postured freely for the Press, she now retired as if in stage fright to one end of her glass cage, sat motionless and goggling behind a fern, presented to squadrons of school children only a vague profile and a view of her naked-looking rear.
Whitey is an albino for the same reason that occasional humans are: congenital lack of black pigment cells in the skin. For some reason albino frogs are far rarer than albino humans, lobsters, squirrels, peacocks, porcupines. About one out of every seven normal humans carries the albino inheritance in his germ-plasm as a recessive Mendelian character, and one person in every 25,000 is an albino. Albinism has been recorded in the great majority of animal and plant species. But Dr. Noble, contemplating Whitey, guessed that possibly not more than one like her could be found among millions of pond frogs. Naturalists believe most "pale frogs" are not true albinos but are pale because a pituitary defect impedes the function of their black pigment cells and not because the cells themselves are lacking. When such albinotic frogs are given injections of pituitrin, they turn dark almost at once.