How Peeing Into Frog Was A Method Of Pregnancy

Science is full of weird and strange experiments and tests done in the past. The women of 2021 should thank their lucky stars when they do a pregnancy test; they just need to pee on a strip and not into a frog. That is right, you heard correctly. Back in the day to see if you were pregnant after a frisky night; you needed to pee into a frog and wait for a few hours to find out.

It all started with one smart scientist named Lancelot Hogben, who fought in world war 1 but hated being a soldier. He found his true passion in zoology where he studied endocrinology, which is study of hormones produced by the organism. He was studying the model organism Xenopus frogs and the hormones they produced. The reason why he was studying Xenopus frogs was the chameleon properties that these frogs showed. Hogben one of many breakthroughs he made was that the adult frog colour was dependent on the early environment. The wild frogs had a brownish colour, while frogs raised in the dark were black, and those raised in the light were light coloured. Hogben found this quite interesting and did further experiments on this property. Hogben came up with a theory linking the colour changes to the pituitary gland. Hogben removed the Xenopus frogs' pituitary gland and found that the colour did not change no matter what conditions the frogs were grown in. That is a cool discovery in the field of Xenopus frogs, but was this not meant to be about peeing into a frog and seeing if you pregnant? Well, best not to rush a unique story.

Hogben then thought to himself, what happens if I inject hormones from an Ox into the Xenopus frogs? He hypothesised that a colour change would occur; however, you always got to be prepared for the unexpected in science. The side effect of injecting Ox hormones into the Xenopus frogs was that the female frogs would ovulate a few hours later. Hogben found this quite fascinating why would Ox hormones cause the female frogs to ovulate. When Hogben studied the Ox's hormones further, he realised that there was a close similarity between the Ox hormones and humans Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG). HCG is an important hormone that someone pregnant produces so that the embryo reaches full term. An interesting side note some cancers produce this hormone as well. So, the Ox hormones being similar to HCG is an important discovery that Hogben made.

As a scientist, Hogben wanted to explore this idea even further. Any good scientist would do what Hogben did and acquire urine from a pregnant lady and non-pregnant lady then inject into the Xenopus frogs. The results were that the pregnant lady caused the Xenopus frog to ovulate in a couple of hours while the non-pregnant lady did not. Hogben knew that he was onto something big; however, he had to move jobs where he found work as chair of social biology at the London School of Economics. However, that is not where the story ends.

On the side of his job, Hogben was doing more research into the causes behind the ovulation and ran more experiments to show that the results he found earlier were not due to chance luck but an actual real result. The reason why this was a big deal as it would have revolutionised the landscape of pregnancy tests. To find out that you were pregnant, you would first need to do a series of experiments over seven days in mice or rabbits, leading to a large number of deaths in mice and rabbits. Hogben, having seen the effects of WW1 and the death it caused, wanted to try to prevent senseless killings. He knew that this new way of doing a pregnancy test would save thousands if not millions of rabbits and lab rats each year. After years of research and getting data Hogben method of pregnancy test was accepted by the 1950s. This was a new method that was reliable and fast for testing for pregnancies.

If your parents or grandparents lived around that time, they would have to have their urine injected into frogs to see if they were pregnant. Science history is fascinating and strange at the same time.