Frogs and Mice Made Pregnancy Testing Possible

I was listening to someone speak yesterday and she was basically covering up for paternity fraud in first born. She made mention that a person could have been pregnant for an ex-boyfriend or so. She made mention of so many things that I do not subscribe to and I am not here to treat the topic of paternity fraud, rather I will like to discuss what became a heated argument yesterday amongst the people that were present while we were listening to the podcast which was "How can a woman be pregnant without knowing"?

As you would expect, when it has to do with science, we can go a long way to get results and in the case of pregnancy, it goes beyond peeing on a strip or rod to confirm. There can be cases where women would get pregnant and will not know that they are pregnant especially when they are not seeing symptoms of pregnancy like morning sickness in the early stages so it is possible. But then, do you know that in the old days, people used frogs to test for pregnancy?

Let me guess, the pregnancy test you know at home is the plastic pregnancy strip or the paper one. Well, it wasn't until in the late 70's that this type of pregnancy strips found their way into the market but before then, we have been using different ways to find out if we were pregnant or not. As far back as 1500 BCE in ancient Egypt, Egyptians have been using a particular way to determine pregnancy status. Their doctors at the time would instruct women to plant Barley and Emmer seeds in different plots of land after which they would urinate on them. If the barley grew, then she should know she was going to birth a boy child but if the Emmer was the one which grew, then she should be expecting a girl child but if non of the seeds grew then she wasn't pregnant.

It sounds ridiculous I guess but Researchers from the National Institute of Health (NIH) found that Wheat and Barley seed watered with urine from men and non-pregnant women didn't sprout while the sprouted about 70% of the time when watered with urine from pregnant women but it didn't show the sex of the child. Researchers came to a conclusion that the amount of estrogen present in the urine helped the sees to sprout.

There have been numerous methods to know if a woman is pregnant. My grandmother would tell me then that there was a leaf that when plugged by a pregnant woman and squeezed with her two palms would cause her to scratch but when done by a non-pregnant woman, nothing would happen. Well, I cannot prove that because I have never come in contact with the leave and I didn't see any study confirming this.

It wasn't until 1927 when a German scientists Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim created the first reliable test for pregnancy up to 99% accuracy known as the A-Z test. It required human urine to be injected into the bodies of young female mice for days after which the mices were dissected to see if their ovaries had grown larger. In 1949, a new version where rabbits were used instead of mice was carried out in the University of Pennsylvania, and it worked just the same way with the mice but it was more popular than the mice test.

Around the same time, Lancelot Hogben, a British scientist working on Hormone theory in South Africa and came across Xenopus laevis (African Clawed Frog). He injected extracts gotten from the pituitary gland of Ox and noticed that the frog laid eggs. This caught the attention of the scientific community and they decided to try if the hormones in pregnant women could cause the frogs to lay egg since the hormone was also created in he pituitary gland. If the frogs had not mate, they wouldn't lay eggs but when they were injected the urine of pregnant women, they laid eggs spontaneously.

While this test gave an almost accurate result of 99% lots of mice and rabbits were slaughtered in other to be able to diagnose if women were pregnant. In the 1960s, rabbits had less injecting as scientist started to use immunoassays since hormones were becoming popular in the scientific world. This test would react to hormones in urine and in this case they were searching for Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hCG) which is an hormone the body produces after a fertilized egg has aligned to the wall of the uterus. They looked for clumping of hCG but then this test wasn't always accurate so there needed to be another way out.

It wasn't until 1972 that the strip test was used to check for pregnancy via the hCG hormone in urine. When a woman is pregnant, hCG hormone begins to double every 24 to 48 hours but then this hormone reaches its peak at 8 - 10 weeks. Since then, we have moved from the inhumane killings of animals to testing without killing them. Although, most of the researches intended for humans today still requires the testing on animals but not in an inhumane way before testing them on us.

Post Reference

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https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/history-home-pregnancy-test/396077/
https://www.ogmagazine.org.au/19/2-19/rabbits-mice-toads-pregnancy-test/
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/pregnancy/pregnancy-tests
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/01/what-s-a-frog-based-pregnancy-test.html
https://www.uofmhealth.org/health-library/hw42062
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05
https://www.firstresponse.com/en/articles-listings/how-pregnancy-tests-work
https://ccac.ca/Documents/Education/Modules/Core_Stream/
https://www.livescience.com/37128-history-of-pregnancy-tests-ept-hcg.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/egyptian-papyrus-reveals
http://www.doctorsreview.com/history/sep05_history/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1034829/pdf/medhist00162-0052.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10525168/
https://history.nih.gov/display/history/Pregnancy+Test+Timeline

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Image Reference

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Image 1 || Flickr || Fetus 10 - 12 weeks
Image 2 || Pickpik || Shallow focus photography of water droplets in brown plants
Image 3 || Wikimedia Commons || Xenopus laevis 02
Image 4 || Wikimedia Commons || Pregnancy test series starting to show positive