Could this be the best science story of 2025?

Get a test tube. Add a pinch of Kafka, a splash of thyroxine, a tablespoon of Thames, some fairy dust, and you have the best science story of 2025. Potentially. The cocktail is at beta stage, as field tests loom. But in terms of language and literary allusions, the research is already a triumph.

Put it this way: if I said “Peter Pan tadpole”, would you like to know more? Magically the phrase fuses two childhood classics – the ageless boy merging with the reckless Mr Toad. The science inspires too, if it works. A man, a plan, a Peter Pan, and goodbye cane toad. Maybe.

Forever a tadpole, never a toad.

The man is Professor Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist and ecologist at Macquarie University. His team has been busy editing genes. Turns out a tadpole needs its full whack to transform into a toad. Subtract one gene, however, and the wriggler can’t produce thyroxine, the metamorphosis hormone, meaning the hatchling will never grow up.

Eternal youth on paper, but in the swampy realm of Rhinella marina (alias Mr Toad), a tadpole is good tucker to all the other cane toads. To hell with cannibalism! A toad’s gotta eat. Besides, who’s going to miss a few hundred babies from 30,000 eggs in one clutch? Even better, the tampered tadpole is plumper than its pristine cousin, making the infant more tempting for the custodial adult.

For the kids who survive the orgy, the Peter-Pan promise is short-lived. Usually, a tadpole takes three weeks to morph into toadette. A scary figure, doing the maths. Yet this gene-edited batch will only squirm for a few more months before dying off, stymied in its cycle.

The plan is ingenious, presuming the field tests endorse the science. “It looks so far that it works remarkably well, in our lab trials, and outdoor ponds,” Rick Shine told Ali Moore last week on 774 ABC Melbourne. “There’s very little poison in a toad tadpole, and so the fish and turtles and birds are fine if they eat them. It looks a very low-risk, effective way to stop toads breeding in the pond down the end of the road.”

Better than toad-golf, apparently, the traditional way of curbing the scourge with a 2-wood. Or toad-freezing. Toad-culling. Toad-busting. Australians have been trying to quell the plague since the Hawaiian solution arrived in 1935 to eat the Queensland cane grub. With little success. Numbers are dizzying, some 200 million at latest census, the horde spreading 2000km westward since their introduction.

Professor Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist and ecologist.

Enter Peter Pan, JM Barrie’s permanent boy, and soon Rhinella marina may be bound for Never-Never Land. At least if WA’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) affirms the controlled release this year. The clock is ticking. The pestilence is just a few hops from Broome – some 150km in fact – to brag a nationwide coverage more efficient than the NBN.

As a lover of words, not to mention quolls who can’t stop choking on toads for tea, I’m backing this zeitgeist venture. Other toad-proofing plans are at play, including Curtin Uni’s measure to disrupt the water-chain across the last stretch to Broome, but there’s a lot to love about the Peter Pan tadpole. One deft edit, and you somehow plunk Hannibal Lecter into a sci-fi puddle, with Kenneth Grahame and a timeless kidult sharing the same gene pool. In a modern Kafka vein, here’s hoping The Trial evolves into The Non-Metamorphosis.