What is the Frog Test to Detect Pregnancy?

A pregnancy test with frogs, also known as the Hogben test, is the urine of a woman. female frog It was done by injecting it under the skin. If the frog lays eggs 12 or 24 hours after this procedure, the result was positive.

So frogs, interestingly, women she could detect the hormone HGG (human chorionic gonadotropin), which heralds 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 Hogben was teaching in South Africa, Xenopus He learned that 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 is the hormones produced by an ox’s pituitary gland (the place in the brain that controls the release of hormones) to these animals. inject they have had.

This is how women’s urine was injected into the frog’s skin

Then, when they saw that the frog started to lay eggs, a light bulb went on in their heads and they did this. in women They also wanted to try. 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.

Lancelot Hogben

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. As the reputation of this initiative spread to such an extent at that time, different researchers also made a large number of researches. frog Tried this test on it.

Moreover, there were indeed very small margins of error in the end result. For example, once 150 frogs Only 3 of the pregnancy detection attempts on 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 began to be used actively in the 1940s, women were directly from the pharmacy Of course, they could not provide this test. 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.

Disturbing representation of AZ testing with mice

For example, the first attempt on this subject was made in 1927 by German scientists Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim. “AZ test” was done with. 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, hurting animals and kill them It was a method.

Later, the same method was tried on rabbits. However, there was no reduction in the slaughter of animals. Imagine, every year just for this test 6,000 the rabbit was killed. 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. Afterwards, these animals destroyed hundreds of living species. chytridiomycosis They were suspected to be carriers of a fungal disease called 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, even today, in many studies around the world, frogs subject means they are used as For example, various studies are carried out on frogs for difficult-to-diagnose conditions, from heart diseases to kidney diseases.

Eben Kirksey

An anthropologist and performance artist who even wondered if a pregnancy test with African veiled frogs was actually correct. Eben Kirkseyconducted 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 audience could see the frog laying eggs, only 1-2 people as time passed. to stain He said he saw similar marks.

After this procedure, Kirksey asked women to apply today’s pregnancy test. The result was interesting because pregnancy tests all three 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.