Is it true that frogs have been successfully used to determine pregnancy?

According to popular belief, in the past, to determine whether a woman was pregnant or not, her urine was injected subcutaneously into frogs, and if the amphibian laid eggs soon, this meant that the woman was expecting a child. We decided to check whether such an unusual diagnostic method actually existed.

Similar practices have been reported "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" And Wonderzine. About her writes and is told in his lectures by Ilya Kolmanovsky, candidate of biological sciences, popularizer of science and host of the Naked Mole-Rat podcast. This method of determining pregnancy called Hogben test named after its discoverer. Mentions of him in English are found in magazines Smithsonian, The Atlantic and even in many scientific And archival articles on PubMed.

The inventor of the test is the scientist Lancelot Hogben, also known for creating the artificial language intergloss. He was interested hormones, their functions and actively experimented with the administration of various hormones to experimental animals. In 1927, the scientist moved to South America and decided on his favorite among experimental animals. It was the clawed frog - Xenopus laevis. The animal was distinguished by its unpretentiousness to living conditions and a fairly high life expectancy in captivity - up to 30 years. Hogben became so fascinated by the xenopus that he even named your house in their honor.

In 1930 Hogben entered xenopus extract from the bovine pituitary gland, noting in his notes that after this the frog laid eggs. At that time, science already knew that the pituitary gland is responsible for the production of hormones that regulate the functions of the ovaries, therefore, during pregnancy their concentration changed. Hogben and his colleague Charles Bellerby made sure that without mating, the frog does not lay eggs spontaneously, therefore, if after injecting it with a woman's urine, it lays eggs, then this clearly indicates that the woman is pregnant.

According to research 1938, in which 150 experimental animals “took part,” the frogs did not give a single false-positive result and gave only three false-negative results (that is, they did not feel the onset of pregnancy). Thus, the Hogben test had a fairly high sensitivity. How wrote one grateful doctor wrote to Hogben and colleagues: “Out of one general practitioner with many years of experience, one gynecologist and a frog, only the frog was right.” Additional factorWhat contributed to its spread was that the frogs could be reused after just a week, which ensured its high availability; the test result could be obtained within 24 hours.

Later, in the 1950s, in the USSR they began to use use not only females, but also males, who, after injecting the urine of a pregnant woman, sowed sperm. Moreover, it turned out that not only xenopus, but also other subspecies of amphibians are suitable for these purposes. Only in the 1960s appeared chemical laboratory test to determine pregnancy, and in 1967, American Margaret Crane came up with it, how to make the test as compact and easy to use as possible, so that women can use it themselves at home. Moreover, in 2012 there was carried out Hogben's latest test to date has been public - a frog named Loretta received the urine of a woman who had recently undergone an IVF protocol. The experiment combined elements of performance, the audience had access to a live broadcast of the injection and further observation of the frog, everyone was looking forward to when the frog would lay eggs. She didn't put it off. Three subsequent chemical tests confirmed that Loretta was right - the IVF procedure was unsuccessful.

Thus, there is no doubt that the "frog" test, or Hogben test, existed. The method had clear mechanics and fairly wide availability. There is enough evidence to support the fact that this is a working procedure and not a modern invention.

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Read on the topic:

1. “Men thought it was immoral”: the history of the invention of the pregnancy test
2. “Little Revolution”: How a woman came up with the first convenient pregnancy test