The pregnancy test has not always been the way to know if you are expecting a child, far from it. We come back to the story of the magic stick.
“For a long time, the only way to know if theohn was pregnant, was to wait. Yes your period stopped, your belly grew and a few months later you gave birth to a baby, it meant in retrospect that you were pregnant”. So begins the Arte video, directed by journalist David Castello Lopes, on the history of the pregnancy test. How did we manage to pee on a magic stick?
To understand its history, let’s start by recalling how it works. The pregnancy test detects a hormone found in our urine early in pregnancy, called “human chorionic gonadotropic hormone“, the famous hCG. Its role is to inform the body that a pregnancy is beginning, it is then evacuated via the urine. It is what comes to cause the chemical reaction on the stick which tells you: “you are pregnant “.
Pee on a bag of barley or inject urine into mice
There are legends about ancient pregnancy tests, such as the one that women in ancient Egypt had to urinate on bags of seeds (wheat and barley) and see if they germinated. But there are also real scientific steps, as shown in the Arte video.
Advances in this area began in the 1920s, thanks to the work of two scientists of German origin, Bernhard Zondek and Selmar Aschheim. They were the inventors of the first pregnancy test, performed using mice. They injected pregnant women’s urine into mice before they reached puberty and found that they began to ovulate. It was a sign that the urine had this pregnancy hormone. This method became a test to determine whether or not we were expecting a child, in the laboratory, the urine was injected into sexually immature mice, we killed them and we looked at whether they had ovulated or not…
The birth of the Predictor, the first pregnancy test
Then the method was modernized during the 1930s, this time thanks to a British geneticist named Lancelot Hogben. He realized thatwe could inject this urine into frogs and see if they gained sexual maturity, without killing them. Which is simply explained by the fact that they lay eggs, a sign that they are ovulating, so…
It was only thirty years later that the pregnancy test stopped using live animals to work! Science is developing a substance that emits a chemical reaction when it comes into contact with the hormone. The first home pregnancy test? It’s called Predictor, it became available in 1977. At the time, you had to mix your urine with the reactive product in a test tube and wait two hours before seeing the result. The Predictor brand still exists in stick form.
Source: Arte
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