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SPEAKER: Minnesota made headlines around the world in 1995 when schoolchildren discovered dozens of grossly deformed frogs in a pond in South Central Minneapolis. Soon, there were more reports of deformed frogs from around Minnesota and other states. Gruesome pictures of frogs with extra legs, or missing legs, or eyes in the wrong place. Everyone wondered if the frogs were a sign that something was wrong in the environment that could also spell trouble for people.

17 years later, scientists still have not completely solved the mystery of the deformed frogs. But we do know more about how the investigation unfolded and how the case of the deformed frog spawned a fight that is within the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency about whether the agency should even look into the matter.

Judy Helgen is an MPCA biologist who push to find out what was behind the deformed frogs. Now she's telling her story in a book called Peril in the Ponds: Deformed Frogs, Politics, and A Biologist's Quest. Helgen has not told her story before. She gave Stephanie Hemphill an early look at the book and gave her a tour of the Ney Nature Center Pond where the deformed frogs were first found.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The Ney Pond is part of a Nature Center near the town of Henderson. It rests in a sloping bowl with cornfields on one side and a scrubby woods on the other. A breeze ripples the surface, red-winged blackbirds stake out their territory, and the sweet scent of milkweed fills the air. It doesn't look like a place that would spark worldwide scientific inquiry. Judy Helgen still shakes her head at the memories this place evokes for her.

JUDY HELGEN: A lot of history at this pond.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Helgen is a retired biologist, a trim woman in her early '70s. She's wearing walking shoes and khaki slacks. Back in August of 1995, she was working at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in St. Paul when she got an urgent call for help. Students on a nature hike had seen a lot of deformed frogs jumping out of this pond. Helgen and an assistant came down to check it out.

JUDY HELGEN: It was terrible. We came down. And the kids and the parents, everybody looked really worried. And the kids had already collected some frogs. And then we went around and did some surveying, and it was horrible.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: More than half of the frogs they collected in this pond were grotesquely deformed. They had missing legs or extra legs or legs that branched out unnaturally into multiple sections. Helgen had never seen anything like it. She examined the frogs, taking careful notes, and brought some of the critters back to her office for further study. Her mind swirled with possible explanations. The pond was made. Had the digging exposed some poison in the soil? Were pesticides running off from the farm fields above? Was it damage from the sun? Parasites?

That hot sticky afternoon turned out to be a turning point in her work and her life. The frogs came to represent far more than an abstract scientific question. The media jumped on the story, and she began getting calls from people who had found their own deformed frogs.

JUDY HELGEN: We had a call from this teacher in. Litchfield and she had a kid bring in a bucket of deformed frogs to school. And so then it became kind of chilling because we started getting phone calls and not just from Minnesota but from people in other states.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Helgen and other scientists regard frogs as a sentinel species. They are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Their skin absorbs what surrounds them, and they move from pond to grass and woods to deeper water and back. When they have problems, it can be a signal that other animals, including humans, may face the same problems eventually. Judy helgen approached outside experts in her quest for an explanation. One of them was Bob McKinell. McKinnell spent most of his career studying frogs and cancer at the University of Minnesota. McKinnell visited the pond in Henderson.

BOB MCKINNELL: I had collected extensively South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota, and in years previous, to that in Vermont. And I simply had never, never, never seen the abundance of abnormalities, such as Judy and those students were seeing in Henderson, and subsequently throughout Minnesota, and even throughout the world.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The many phone calls helgen was getting led her to so-called hotspots. Places where lots of deformed frogs were found. She made it her mission to collect samples of frogs, water, and sediment, and to record conditions with as much detail as possible at each of these locations.

She coordinated the research of an informal group of biologists, toxicologists, hydrologists, chemists, experts in endocrines, and parasites, and animal development. They worked in labs and in the field around the US and in Canada. They cataloged frogs with missing legs, fingers, and toes, extra legs, partial legs, skin webbing that prevented legs from stretching, and missing and extra eyes.

As she dug deeper into the mystery of the frogs, Helgen began to feel a closer connection to them than she ever had before. There was one moment when she realized they had become deeply important to her. It happened one moonlit night when she approached a pond to record the frogs.

The chorus of frogs started with the spring papers and the tree frogs, and the leopard frogs were growling. I mean, they're hard to hear. They kind of grumble. And it was just like, they were calling me back to an old, very ancient time, and realizing that they had evolved like 300 million years ago. And I just had a much more spiritual connection with them. Hearing the calls did it. It sends shivers up your spine to hear the frogs chorusing at night.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Helgen wasn't the only one who cared about the frogs. Ordinary people were curious and concerned from the beginning. But two years after the initial discovery, concern turned to fear when the issue moved from nature into people's homes. A federal agency had found that deformed frog embryos would grow in tap water from the homes of three families who lived near hotspot ponds.

The MPCA delivered bottled water to the families, and researchers redoubled their efforts. Soon they discovered that cleaning the well water with a charcoal filter eliminated whatever was causing the deformities. Later interpretation of the original embryo in tap water study determined the results were actually inconclusive. The picture was getting more and more confusing. Nature was proving too complex to offer easy answers.

Helgen and her fellow researchers grappled with all sorts of theories. Pesticides or other chemicals that can interfere with normal development. Increased levels of ultraviolet light, which can damage genes. Predators. At the Ney Pond, even radioactive fallout from some unknown source, possibly nuclear testing, was a suspect.

Some researchers focused on a parasite that burrows into tadpoles causing developing legs to branch into two. Helgen says what she calls a natural explanation was appealing, but most deformities consist of missing limbs, not multiple limbs.

JUDY HELGEN: This naturally caused people don't need to worry. I think that was part of what was back of that. And so now, even the proponents are saying, yeah. It's not the explanation of most of the deformities. So we're still here with a mystery. Really, it's unsolved.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: In her book, Judy Helgen describes fighting a war on two fronts. On the one hand, she worked overtime on the quest to find out what was wrong with the frogs. And on the other, she confronted what felt to her like bitter resistance from her bosses at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. She says at first, they refused to ask the legislature for money to fund and expand the frog research. She says her bosses feared they would lose money for other priority projects. Then when the legislature allocated money anyway, Helgen says they raided the frog money and used it for other purposes. She admits she didn't have a lot of patience with the bureaucracy, and she sometimes bent the rules.

JUDY HELGEN: If you didn't push, you wouldn't be able to do what you thought was important to do. And I think that's probably true for everybody. If you don't take a stand and really try hard to get what you think is important, even at personal risk. there were many times when I thought I'd be fired.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: At the MPCA, Mike Sandusky is head of the division that took over Helgen's work in an agency reorganization in 1998. He says he doesn't know about or remember many of the specific events Helgen chronicles in her book. But Sandusky says many of the agency's scientists are fierce fighters for the issues they work on, and the agency values such commitment. Sandusky warns against looking for ulterior motives in government decisions. He says, usually the simplest explanation is the right one.

MIKE SANDUSKY: And it's a lack of funding, or it's priorities, or we're running into things that are not part of our mandate and our mission. This is a fairly routine thing that happens here, but people always are looking for reasons that by and large do not exist.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: MPCA officials told Helgen that the agency was not a research organization, that it was set up to enforce laws, not to investigate scientific problems. Helgen says she felt threatened for most of the time she worked on the frog research, even after she found a champion in the legislature.

JUDY HELGEN: Representative Munger is one of my heroes.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Within six months of the initial discovery, DFL State Representative Willard Munger of Duluth, the folksy politician people called Mr. Environment, held two hearings at the State Capitol. Some of the students who had found the deformed frogs at the Ney Pond spoke to legislators. Afterwards, student Ryan Fisher told NPR it would take a while to find the answer because no one knew whether the deformities would continue.

RYAN FISHER: We've only found first year frogs, which means either this is the first year it's happened, or they're all dying, which is possible. When you look at the deformities, it's very possible that they're not living through the year.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: That hearing was a pivotal moment for Judy Helgen.

JUDY HELGEN: Boy, you could have heard a pin drop in that hearing room. I mean, those kids were so passionate. And that was the hearing where I was told before I went over there that if PCA is offered money, that I will have to say we can't take it from the legislature.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: It was Munger who persuaded fellow legislators to fund the frog research at the MPCA. But a few years later after Munger's death, the funding stopped, and the MPCA dropped its research into frogs.

JUDY HELGEN: And the deformed frog problem hadn't gone away, but our agency did. And so it just made me very sad.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Back at the Ney Nature Center, some of the young people who first discovered the deformed frogs are still around after 17 years. Becky Pollock was a middle school student back then. Judy Helgen became a role model for her. And today, she directs the Nature Center where she met Helgen 17 years ago. She loves taking young kids to the pond to collect mayfly and damselfly nymphs and other tiny creatures. She says they don't find many deformed frogs here anymore.

BECKY POLLOCK: I'm hoping that it means the environment's cleaning itself up and going through a natural filtering system, and whatever was there is hopefully no longer.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Those damselfly nymphs are a sign of a healthy ecosystem. Judy Helgen dedicated herself to finding ways to keep our natural world healthy. She spearheaded research on deformed frogs, but she also leaves a broader legacy. She helped create a new way of evaluating the health of wetlands by observing which plants and animals live only in healthy wetlands and which can survive in degraded environments. That biomonitoring system is widely used today.

Her book, Peril in the Ponds, has just been published by University of Massachusetts Press. Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio News at the Ney Nature Center near Henderson.

SPEAKER: Online now see photos of the Ney Nature Center and some of the deformed frogs at mprnews.org.