Lancelot Thomas Hogben

Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He developed the African clawed frog ''(Xenopus laevis)'' as a model organism for biological research in his early career, attacked the eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and popularised books on science, mathematics and language in his later career.

Early life and education

Hogben was born and raised in Southsea near Portsmouth in Hampshire. His parents were Methodists. He attended Tottenham County School in London, his family having moved to Stoke Newington, where his mother had grown up, in 1907, and then as a medical student studied physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge. Hogben had matriculated into the University of London as an external student before he could apply to Cambridge and he graduated as a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in 1914. He took his Cambridge degree in 1915, graduating with an Ordinary BA. He had acquired socialist convictions, changing the name of the university's Fabian Society to Socialist Society and went on to become an active member of the Independent Labour Party. Later in life he preferred to describe himself as 'a scientific humanist'.
Kunitz, Stanley J. and Haycraft, Howard ''Twentieth Century Authors, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature'', (Third Edition). New York, The H.W. Wilson Company, 1950, (pp. 658–59)

In the First World War he was a pacifist, and joined the Quakers. He worked for six months with the Red Cross in France, under the auspices of the Friends' War Victims Relief Service and then the Friends' Ambulance Unit. He then returned to Cambridge, and was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector in 1916. His health collapsed and he was released in 1917. His brother George was also a conscientious objector, serving with the Friends' Ambulance Unit.

Career

After a year's convalescence he took lecturing positions in London universities and in 1921 he became a Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) in Zoology of the University of London. He moved in 1922 to the University of Edinburgh and its Animal Breeding Research Department.In 1923, Hogben was a founder of the Society for Experimental Biology and its organ the '' British Journal of Experimental Biology'' (renamed ''Journal of Experimental Biology'' in 1930), along with Julian Huxley and geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew (1886–1973). According to Gary Werskey, Hogben was the only one of the founders not holding any eugenic ideas. In 1923 he was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were James Hartley Ashworth, James Cossar Ewart, Francis Albert Eley Crew and John Stephenson. He won the Society's Keith Prize for the period 1933–35. He then went to McGill University.

In 1927 he became zoology chair at the University of Cape Town. He worked in endocrinology, studying chameleon properties of the Xenopus frog. The frog's adult color depended on its early environment; wild frogs became brownish-green, while frogs raised in a dark environment became black, and in a light environment, light-colored. Hogben theorized that the frog's ability to develop differences in color was related to the pituitary gland. After removing the pituitary gland, the frogs became white regardless of their environment.

The frogs also developed a side effect that Hogben tried to counteract by injecting the frogs with pituitary extract from an ox. He noticed that female Xenopus frogs ovulated within hours of being injected with the extract. In this way, Hogben serendipitously discovered a human pregnancy test. He knew that the ox extract chemically resembled human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), a hormone released by pregnant women. He confirmed that female Xenopus frogs, when injected with urine from a pregnant woman, ovulated within hours. Hogben found the job in South Africa attractive, but his antipathy to the country's racial policies drove him to leave.

In 1930 Hogben moved to the London School of Economics, in a chair for social biology. There he continued to develop the Hogben Pregnancy Test. Previous pregnancy tests required several days to carry out and resulted in the deaths of mice or rabbits. Hogben's pregnancy test took hours and could be carried out without harm to the frogs, which could be reused for future tests. It became the major, international pregnancy test for about fifteen years, from the mid-1930s through the 1940s.

The social biology position at the London School of Economics was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and when it withdrew funding Hogben moved to Aberdeen, becoming Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen in 1937.

During World War II Hogben had responsibility for the British Army's medical statistics. From 1941–1947 he was Mason Professor of Zoology at the University of Birmingham and professor of medical statistics there 1947–1961, when he retired.
In 1963, he became the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana, a post he abandoned in April 1964, resigning in 1965.

Xenopus pregnancy test controversy

Hogben's claim to have discovered the Xenopus pregnancy test was disputed by two South African researchers, Hillel Shapiro and Harry Zwarenstein. Shapiro had been Hogben's student in Cape Town, and he acknowledged that Hogben had suggested that Xenopus was a suitable subject for general research. The pregnancy test itself was discovered by Shapiro and his co-researcher, Harry Zwarenstein, and their results and report had been widely published in medical journals and text books in South Africa and the United Kingdom; in their report published by Royal Society of South Africa in October 1933, Shapiro and Zwarenstein announced that in the previous month they had successfully used Xenopus in 35 pregnancy tests. The following spring ''Nature'' carried their report. Shapiro and Zwarenstein's letter published in the ''British Medical Journal'' on 16 November 1946 clarified that Hogben was retrospectively wrongly claiming credit for discovering the pregnancy test. Nobel laureate John B. Gurdon of the Wellcome CRC Institute and Nick Hopwood of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, elaborated on this in detail in their comprehensive article published in '' The International Journal of Developmental Biology'', pointing out that although Hogben had demonstrated in principle that Xenopus might be used for testing the presence of gonadotrophins in a pregnant woman's urine, his reporting had not mentioned pregnancy testing at all; he seemed to have had other research directions.

Political views

While he was Chair for Social Biology at the London School of Economics, Hogben unleashed a relentless attack on the British eugenics movement, which was at its apex in the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to eugenicists, who commonly drew a strict line between heredity (or nature) and environment (or nurture), Hogben highlighted the 'interdependence of nature and nurture'. Hogben's appeal to this interdependence of nature and nurture marked the first time gene-environment interaction (or 'gene-environment interplay') was used to undermine statistical attempts to partition the contributions of nature and nurture, as well as the eugenic implications drawn from those statistics. Hogben's foil throughout this period was R.A. Fisher, the leading scientist-eugenicist of the day (Tabery 2008).

In an interview for the book ''Twentieth Century Authors'', Hogben stated:

"I like Scandinavians, skiing, swimming and socialists who realize it is our business to promote social progress by peaceful methods. I dislike football, economists, eugenicists, Fascists, Stalinists, and Scottish conservatives. I think that sex is necessary and bankers are not".

Popular science writing

Inspired by the example of ''The Outline of History'' by H. G. Wells