You are NOT the father! Yessss suck it yo hahaha. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. Oh noo. This is good. As if. How do you not know that you’re pregnant? There are a lot of reasons why someone might not notice a pregnancy. Not everyone experiences symptoms like morning sickness in the early stages. Even testing for pregnancy has way more science behind it than peeing on a little plastic rod will have you think. Actually, that reminds me, did you know that we used to test for pregnancy by injecting urine into frogs? NO. And what made you think I wanted to know!? This episode concerns fertility and medical history. That includes descriptions of animal testing. If you have any further questions, we recommend speaking with medical professionals. And with that out of the way, Let’s get into it. The first official home pregnancy test only showed up on shelves in the late 70’s, but humans have been trying to figure out if they have a bun in the oven for thousands of years. As far back as 1,500 BCE, Egyptians had a special trick to determine if someone was pregnant or not. A 3,500 year old papyrus located in the University of Copenhagen details the New Kingdom’s methods for pregnancy detection. Swnws, which were essentially doctors, would instruct a woman to plant barley and emmer seeds in separate plots, and urinate on them. If the barley grew, then she should expect a boy, if the emmer grew, then she should expect a girl, and if neither grew, then she wasn’t pregnant. And that worked? Surprisingly yes! Researchers from the National Institutes of Health found that wheat and barley watered with urine from men and non-pregnant women would not sprout, but the same grains watered with urine from pregnant women sprouted 70% of the time. That being said, the grains could not determine the sex of the child. Their theory was that the increased levels of estrogen in their urine would help the seeds sprout. A good millenia later, came the “Piss Prophets.” Piss? Prophets? Early physicians who claimed to be able to predict the nature of a pregnancy based on their readings of pee. These “uromancers” would swirl, mix, smell, and even taste their patients urine to predict their future. Eww. To determine a pregnancy, they would dip a needle into it, and if the needle rusted or turned black, the woman was pregnant. I’ll be honest, I can’t find any sources of how accurate this technique was, but my guess is not very. God, Brew, what’s with all the pee stuff? First the elevator thing, and now this? Technically, this is Churry Povich’s fault. There are a ton of folk techniques to determine if you’re pregnant or not. But the first reliable test able to provide answers with up to 99% accuracy was invented in 1927, by German scientists Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim who called it the “A-Z Test”, which required human urine to be injected into the bodies of immature female mice for a few days, then dissecting them to see if their ovaries had grown larger. What’s worse is that a few years later, in 1949, a new version of the test debuted at the University of Pennsylvania, but instead of using mice, used rabbits. It worked the exact same way, but was significantly more popular among culture at large, so much so that the phrase “the rabbit died” became a euphemism for being pregnant. In reality, the rabbits always died, because, like mice, they needed to be dissected to get an answer. At the time the test was in full swing, over 6000 rabbits were slaughtered per year in a single pregnancy diagnosis center. It was around this time that hormone theory began to make its way around the scientific community. In the 1960’s, instead of injecting things willy nilly into rabbits and mice, scientists started using immunoassays, tests that would react to hormones in urine from patients. In this case, they were searching for hCG, or Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, a hormone that the body produces when a fertilized egg attaches to the lining of the uterus at the beginning of pregnancy. If the hCG clumped in a specific way, scientists could tell if one was pregnant or not. Unfortunately this test wasn’t that accurate, and led to many false positives, because other hormones could easily be confused for hCG. A quick decade later in 1972 came a more accurate version of the immunoassay test which used a specially treated strip to determine the level of hCG in urine. It was these tests that would go on to become the little plastic sticks that we know them to be today. Some brands claim to be able to give you an answer faster than others. hCG doubles in amount every 36-48 hours, and peaks at 8-10 weeks into a pregnancy, so tests that claim to give you answers earlier are just designed to react to lower levels of hCG than others. How does this at all have to do with peeing on frogs? You remember the mice and the rabbits, right? Yeah…? What about them? In the early 20th century, around the same time “A-Z” tests were used on mice, British Scientist Lancelot Hogben was working on hormone theory in South Africa. This is where he met a little amphibian that would change his life and the course of human history: Xenopus laevis, or the African Clawed Frog, which lived peacefully in sub-saharan for millions of years… until Hogben arrived. Hogben injected an extract from the ox’s pituitary gland into the frog. Augh. and discovered that it made the creature lay eggs. This was a watershed moment for the scientific community, since it had just been revealed that the urine of pregnant women contained hormones produced in the pituitary gland. If those hormones produced in humans could trigger the same egg laying action in the frogs, then they would become living pregnancy tests. How is this any better? The benefit of the “Hogben Test” was that it didn’t require the frogs to be dissected afterwards. His colleague Charles Bellerby, proved that the African Clawed Frog did not lay eggs spontaneously when they’re not mating, and they would reliably lay eggs when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman. One doctor even wrote to Hogben’s team saying “Thank you for your report on the pregnancy test on Mrs. X. You may be interested to know that of one GP of many years’ standing, one specialist gynaecologist and one frog, only the frog was correct.” The frogs could live up to 30 years, and the tests weren’t as hard on them as the rabbits and mice, so they could be relied on for years. Since then, we’ve moved away from living pregnancy tests. For most of us, I'm sure that the topic of animal testing will conjure up some conflicting feelings. However, most of the life-saving research we have today is owed to these practices, and to the individuals responsible. Right this second, vaccines are being developed for a variety of things. To ensure these vaccines are safe, legally, they must be tested on animals prior to human trials. That being said, much like any science, animal testing today is a much more humane endeavor than it once was. The folks who work in these fields obviously appreciate the gravity of their work, but many of them still do care about the welfare of the animals being tested on. That's why we have "The Three R's" of Humane Animal Experimentation. These R's stand for: replacement, reduction, and refinement. Replacement, as the name suggests, refers to the replacing or avoidance of animal testing whenever possible. If an animal study is absolutely necessary, then replacement can also refer to replacing that animal with one considered less sentient—they may elect to use an invertebrate species like a nematode. Reduction is to ensure that the strategy behind the research will result in the fewest amount of animals tested on in order to get the data required. And Refinement relates to the measures taken to improve the animal's welfare during such trials. That means giving them the best possible living conditions from the day they're born, to the day they die. But they still die? Yeah.. ...And medicine helps people. It does.. Yeah I don’t know how to feel on this one. Well.. yeah. Me neither. I think that's the main take-away here. Like coffee, science can be bold and beautiful, but I’ll be the first to say that it can also be pretty bitter sometimes.
