The pregnancy test with frogs, also known as the Hogben test, was done by injecting a woman’s urine under the skin of a female frog. If the frog lays eggs 12 or 24 hours after this procedure, the result was positive.
In other words, frogs could detect the hormone HGG (human chorionic gonadotropin), which, interestingly, heralds women’s pregnancy. So far, everything is okay, but how and how was it discovered that a frog would work in a pregnancy test?
This test was invented by British biologist Lancelot Hogben in 1930.
The biologist wanted to design a pregnancy test in his own way and was doing research on animals that he could use as test subjects. Meanwhile, while teaching in South Africa, Hogben learned that Xenopus frogs (African veiled) are sensitive to hormone changes. Then, in 1937, the biologist, together with the animal geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew, brought 1,500 Xenopus frogs from South Africa to England.
Within two years, they pondered whether they could use the frogs for pregnancy tests and did various studies. For example, the most notable of these was the injection of hormones produced by an ox’s pituitary gland (the place in the brain that controls the release of hormones) into these animals.
Then, when they saw that the frog was starting to lay eggs, a light bulb went off in their heads and they wanted to try this process on women as well. Because it is already known that the urine of pregnant women contains hormones (including HGG) produced in the pituitary and affecting the development of the ovaries.
The researchers found that the test was successful when they tried it on women, and then thought about how they could expand the test in the medical field. Since the reputation of this initiative was very widespread at that time, different researchers also tried this test on a large number of frogs.
Moreover, there were indeed very small margins of error in the end result. For example, of the one pregnancy detection trial on 150 frogs, only 3 failed. In other words, it would be more accurate to say that even if the person was pregnant, the frogs could not test it.
So how did women use this test?
When this test started to be used actively in the 1940s, women could not obtain this test directly from the pharmacy, as it is now. It was just like this: Let’s say you are a patient of a doctor. That doctor was ordering the test from the laboratories where this test was performed, and he was calling you and performing the procedure.
In fact, frogs were not the first animals used as test subjects to detect pregnancy.
For example, the first attempt on this subject was made by German scientists Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim in 1927 with the “AZ test”. This test was performed by injecting immature female mice with the urine of a pregnant woman for several days.
After that, unfortunately, the bodies of the mice were dismembered and their ovaries were checked to see if they were larger than normal. Let’s say the ovary of the animal was large, then it was understood that the woman was pregnant. Because this showed that a mouse had reached sexual maturity, this was thought to be a data that revealed pregnancy. But as you can see, it was a method that inflicted pain on animals and killed them.
Later, the same method was tried on rabbits. However, there was no reduction in the slaughter of animals. Imagine, 6,000 rabbits were killed each year just for this test. That’s why experts say that frogs are more suitable for this type of experiment. For example, frogs are animals that can live for 30 years in a laboratory environment, as long as such medical experiments do not kill them. So for a pregnancy test, a frog was preferred because it could be used over and over again and this test didn’t kill it.
When modern pregnancy tests came to light, frogs’ shoes were thrown on the roof.
In the 1960s, with the advent of tests that gave the result of pregnancy by urinating on a stick, frog tests were no longer performed. Since the Hogben test has thus become obsolete, frogs in the lab have been released into the wild. These animals were later suspected to be carriers of a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, which wiped out hundreds of species. Although it was thought that veiled frogs were catching this disease by eating everything that came their way because of their appetite, these claims could not be proven.
In fact, researchers state that even today, frogs are used as subjects in many studies around the world. For example, various studies are carried out on frogs for difficult-to-diagnose conditions, from heart diseases to kidney diseases.
In fact, anthropologist and performance artist Eben Kirksey, who wondered if the pregnancy test with African veiled frogs was really accurate, did an interesting experiment in 2012. Kirksey wanted to use the Hogben test to find out if a total of three women, one of whom was in vitro fertilization, were pregnant by purchasing frogs from a company that somehow supplied these frogs. Moreover, she did it in front of everyone in Brooklyn.
How do you say: The expert injected the female’s urine into the animal and waited for the frog to lay eggs in a live broadcast watched by 130 people. None of the bystanders could see the frog laying eggs, only 1-2 people said they saw spots that looked like spotting as time passed.
After this procedure, Kirksey asked women to apply today’s pregnancy test. The result was interesting because all three pregnancy tests were negative. Ultimately, Kirksey said that this frog test really does work. Well, have you heard before that frogs are used for pregnancy test, or did you learn about it for the first time in this article? You can share your views with us in the comments.
- Sources: Business Insider, The Atlantic
- Image Sources: The Spinoff, Yahoo News Canada
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