Menu

Skip to content
  • Home|
  • About|
  • Participate|
  • Social Directory|

The Well:

MBL News from the Source

You are here: Home / Best Pregnancy Test used to be African Clawed Frogs | Business Insider

Best Pregnancy Test used to be African Clawed Frogs | Business Insider

Published on August 3, 2017
Best Pregnancy Test used to be African Clawed Frogs | Business Insider
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Pin on Pinterest
Pinterest
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin

By Dave Mosher

Note: Mosher visited the National Xenopus Resource at the Marine Biological Laboratory in June; his recaps his visit in the article below.

Pregnancy tests today are as simple as peeing on a toothbrush-size stick and waiting a few minutes. Chemicals in the sticks can detect a key pregnancy hormone: human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG).

Back in 1920s and 30s, however, the best available test for hCG was much slower, less accurate — and pretty gruesome.

Called the Aschheim-Zondek or “A-Z” test, it required injecting several female mice, rats, or rabbits with a woman’s urine, waiting a few days, killing the rodents, and then examining their ovaries for any enlargement spurred by the hormone. By 1935, an English lab was performing 6,000 A-Z tests a year.

But a new pregnancy test was actively being discovered at the same time, and it wound up reigning for more than two decades. ….

“You used take a woman’s urine, inject it into the back of the frog, and if the frog laid eggs 12 hours to 24 hours later, you knew the woman was pregnant,” Marko Horb, who directs the NIH-funded National Xenopus Resource in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, told Business Insider. Read more …

Caption: An African clawed frog, or Xenopus laevis, in the National Xenopus Resource at the Marine Biological Laboratory. Credit: Dave Mosher/Business Insider

Source: Best pregnancy test used to be African clawed frogs | Business Insider

Posted in MBL in the News | Tagged via bookmarklet

Post navigation

← Picturing the Invisible: Where Photography and Microscopy Meet Behind the Scenes in Embryology 2017: Not Just About Science | The Node →

MBL in the News

  • Mesmerizing Video Study Reveals How Octopus Arms Are So Flexible | ScienceAlert
  • A Newfound Source of Cellular Order in the Chemistry of Life| Quanta Magazine
  • Jellyfish Build Walls of Water to Swim Around the Ocean | The New York Times
  • The World’s Most Diverse Group of Bacteria Lives Inside Your Mouth | Popular Science
  • Camouflaged words: A Conversation with Roger Hanlon on Art and Science | st_age
  • Enthusiastic Crew Cares For The Mary Garden | Falmouth Enterprise
  • Octopus And Squid Evolution Is Stranger Than We Imagined | ScienceAlert
  • Falmouth’s Great Pond Area Next Up For Sewering | Falmouth Enterprise
  • Future Of Climate Change, Tongue Microbiome | Science Friday
  • A Closer Look at the Genomes of Mouth Microbial Communities | Harvard University
Archived Posts

Subscribe to the Well

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts.

Copyright © 2021 Marine Biological Laboratory