Revitalizing The Frog Pregnancy Test

"Think you might be pregnant?" writes The Huffington Post. "All you'll have to do is inject your urine into a frog. Cool?"

Earlier this summer I began offering free pregnancy tests involving Xenopus frogs for anyone living in New York City who might be interested.  This morning a friend took me up on the offer.  She was inseminated a few weeks ago and missed her period over the weekend.  Instead of peeing on a stick, my friend will be watching this live video feed the next 24 hours.  If she is pregnant the frog will start laying eggs.



Live Video streaming by Ustream

In the 1930s people began conducting pregnancy tests using Xenopus frogs.  The method is simple.  Pee in a cup, draw some urine into a syringe, and inject the liquid into the lymph-node sack on the frog's hind leg.

Edward R. Elkan's 1938 article gives detailed instructions about how to perform the test.  "Some of the objections to this test raised by earlier observers seem to have become invalid," writes Elkan, "as as the early detection of pregnancy remains important from the psychological and the gynecological points of view a method which allows the diagnosis to be made within a few hours should be welcome."

Before frogs, it was mice and rabbits. From Slate:

In the late 1920s, a German chemist, Selmar Aschheim, teamed up with a gynecologist, Bernhard Zondek, to develop the first of these procedures, called the "A-Z test." The doctors would repeatedly inject five female mice with a woman's urine over several days. Then they'd kill the mice, dissect them, and examine their ovaries—enlarged or congested specimens would signal a pregnancy. Within a few years a slightly better test was developed; it used rabbits.

 The Xenopus pregnancy test became a more ethical and economical test when compared to the rabbit or mouse test.  The frogs were not killed and, if treated well, lived up to 15 years in labs.  They can be reused for the test every couple of months.

A talent for helping humans divine pregnancy earned Xenopus a ticket around the world.  Planned Parenthood, and other organizations promoting reproductive rights, began supporting research about the test.  Medical clinics in England, the United States, and Australia adopted the frog pregnancy test as a standard bioassay.

Many people have come to the conclusion that there is something profoundly wrong with how animals are used and abused in the contemporary United States.  Animals and their body parts are endlessly cycled into commodity chains:  a meat-industrial-complex turns animals into food, pharmaceutical companies use laboratory animals to produce drugs, puppy farms generate an excess of potential pets.  In response to these uses of animals by business interests, PETA insists that “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any way.” 

Val Plumwood, a feminist philosopher, is a sharp critic of those who insist that humans should abstain from all use of animals.  Offering a new approach to interspecies ethics, Plumwood celebrates human-animal relationships and affirms the necessity of entering into new partnerships with others.  She places humans in an ecological universe where relations of mutual use and exploitation are the name of the game.  If PETA holds humans apart from animals—insisting that we should never eat or use animals—in the world of Val Plumwood humans are never “outside nature.”   

New York City pet stores are currently selling Xenopus for cheap.  White albinos and speckled brown frogs are both widely available for sale--for just a few dollars each.  Within a year or two, female frogs reach maturity and are ready for testing.  Adult females, gravid with eggs and ready for testing, can be obtained from Xenopus Express (1-800-Xenopus or http://xenopus.com/).

Visiting Darcy Kelley's Xenopus Lab

Darcy B. Kelley's Xenopus Lab from Ahjin Kim on Vimeo.

On April 5th, 2012, the students in Eben Kirksey’s graduate course “The Anthropology of Science” visited the lab of Darcy Kelly at Columbia University. 

After wandering around the maze of the Columbia campus, riding up two elevators in two buildings, we located the lab. Our small class filled a seminar room where we held our discussion. Dr. Kelley quickly opened up and talked freely about Xenopus frogs and her research. “It seemed immediately clear that Darcy Kelley had a sincere affinity for this species,” wrote Charlie Nichols, one student in the class.  “Indeed, as she spoke to our class she held a toy, a rubber frog, in front of her on the desk. She talked about the politics of procuring frogs for her research, the qualities that make Xenopus an ideal candidate for her academic inquiries, and defended Xenopus against allegations that it has threatened the livelihoods of other amphibians.”

Fifty million year old fossils of Xenopus have been found, according to Dr. Kelley.  She speculated that this adaptable frog will outlive the human species.

Dr. Kelley traces her personal connection to Xenopus frogs back to her early interests in hormones and sexual differentiation. After studying bird song at the beginning of her career, as a post-doctoral researcher, she she began working with frogs because it is “easier to take the whole system apart and figure out how it works.”

After speaking with us for around 40 minutes, Dr. Kelley showed us the frog room. She warned us before we went in that “it’s not too thrilling. They all look alike.” The frogs were stored in clear plastic tanks on metal shelves. In contrast to the sunny seminar room, this room was windowless.  With a concrete floor it resembled a small storage closet. A mechanical hum—the whir of machines, maybe an air conditioning unit—washed the room in sound. A sheet of paper entitled: “Frog Care Procedures” was taped to the door with instructions on how to care for a sick frog: “Isolate and place on bottom shelf” followed by a phone number for reporting the sick frog. Also, the care procedures instructed, in the case of death: “Separate tank, spray it with bleach.”

           

There were around eleven species of frogs in the room as well as a chimera that Dr. Kelley had made by fusing two embryos together. She picked up a wriggling frog for us to examine, inviting us to touch his slime, promising it felt like “velvet.” Despite her comment that the frogs all looked alike, she spoke affectionately to and about the frogs, calling one “sweetie.”  Cooing to the chimera frog, she remarked: “She’s so big!”  And concluded “these guys are in very good shape.”

The full interview is available on SoundCloud