The San Francisco Chronicle reports from Mill Valley, California, March 20, 1997:

A high-school student says his award-winning radiation experiment was dropped from a science fair because competition officials believed it was cruel to animals—in this case, fruit flies.

Ari Hoffman, whose experiment showed that the flies' reproduction rates dropped when radiation levels rose, won first prize at a recent Marin County science fair.

But officials from the Bay Area Science Fair disqualified him from their competition, which included about 300 entries and took place last weekend in San Francisco. The experiment, they said, conflicted with the fair's rules against cruelty to animals, both vertebrates and invertebrates.

"The rules are consistent with national science fair regulations," said Warren Hagberg, the Bay Area fair's executive director.

"It's true that some of the flies never woke up from the anesthesia, possibly due to exposure to radiation," said Ari, a 15-year-old sophomore at Tamalpais High School. Others were euthanized because they became infected with mites.

But otherwise, he thinks the flies were pampered. For example, he said the flies were kept in tropical temperatures and fed well during the 10-week project. Ari's father, Dr. William Y. Hoffman, a plastic surgeon at the University of California at San Francisco, also worked on the experiment and agreed that the flies were not treated badly.

Ari says he wishes he'd had the chance to defend himself. "I'm proud of my experiment. I'm just upset they didn't give me a chance to clarify what I did," he said. "It seemed very political."

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