You may well ask, “What the hell do frogs have to do with human pregnancy tests?!”
The African clawed frog
was imported around the world for its use in pregnancy tests. Doctors
would ship urine samples to frog labs, where technicians would inject
female frogs with a bit of the urine into their hind leg. The animals
would be placed back into their tanks, and in the morning the
technicians would check for tell-tale frog eggs dotting the water. If
the female frog had ovulated, that meant the woman who provided the
urine was pregnant and the pregnancy hormone, had kicked off ovulation
in the frog. From here, using the frogs DNA it was just a matter of time
for scientist to copy and develop a synthetic means and replace the
frog .
The Mexican Horse Thief knows all sorts of irrelevant, but interesting things.
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