34 Facts About Lancelot Hogben

Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician.

Lancelot Hogben developed the African clawed frog as a model organism for biological research in his early career, attacked the eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and wrote popular books on science, mathematics and language in his later career.

Lancelot Hogben 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.

Lancelot 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 in 1914.

Lancelot Hogben took his Cambridge degree in 1915, graduating with an Ordinary BA.

Lancelot Hogben 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.

Lancelot Hogben 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.

Lancelot Hogben then returned to Cambridge, and was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector in 1916.

Lancelot Hogben's health collapsed and he was released in 1917.

Lancelot Hogben's brother George was a conscientious objector, serving with the Friends' Ambulance Unit.

Lancelot Hogben moved in 1922 to the University of Edinburgh and its Animal Breeding Research Department.

In 1923, Lancelot Hogben was a founder of the Society for Experimental Biology and its organ the British Journal of Experimental Biology, along with Julian Huxley and geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew.

Lancelot Hogben's proposers were James Hartley Ashworth, James Cossar Ewart, Francis Albert Eley Crew and John Stephenson.

Lancelot Hogben worked in endocrinology, studying chameleon properties of the Xenopus frog.

Lancelot Hogben theorized that the frog's ability to develop differences in color was related to the pituitary gland.

The frogs developed a side effect that Lancelot Hogben tried to counteract by injecting the frogs with pituitary extract from an ox.

Lancelot Hogben noticed that female Xenopus frogs ovulated within hours of being injected with the extract.

Lancelot Hogben knew that the ox extract chemically resembled human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone released by pregnant women.

Lancelot Hogben confirmed that female Xenopus frogs, when injected with urine from a pregnant woman, ovulated within hours.

Lancelot Hogben found the job in South Africa attractive, but his antipathy to the country's racial policies drove him to leave.

In 1930 Lancelot Hogben moved to the London School of Economics, in a chair for social biology.

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

Shapiro had been Lancelot Hogben's student in Cape Town, and he acknowledged that Lancelot Hogben had suggested that Xenopus was a suitable subject for general research.

Shapiro and Zwarenstein's letter published in the British Medical Journal on 16 November 1946 clarified that Lancelot Hogben was retrospectively wrongly claiming credit for discovering the pregnancy test.

In contrast to eugenicists, who commonly drew a strict line between heredity and environment, Lancelot Hogben highlighted the 'interdependence of nature and nurture'.

Lancelot Hogben produced two best-selling works of popular science, Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen.

In 1918 Lancelot Hogben married the mathematician, statistician, socialist and feminist Enid Charles from Denbigh with whom he had two sons and two daughters.

Later that year Lancelot Hogben married Jane Roberts, a local widowed retired school headmistress, who was seven years younger.

Lancelot Hogben was an atheist, and defined himself as a "scientific humanist".

Lancelot Hogben was awarded the Neill Prize, and a gold medal, for his work in mathematical genetics.

In 1936, Lancelot Hogben became a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Lancelot Hogben has published a series of important papers on the effect of hormones on the pigmentary effector system and on the reproductive cycle of vertebrates, and has worked on many branches of comparative physiology.

Lancelot Hogben's research has left a lasting impression on the history of biology.

The African clawed frog, which Lancelot Hogben first developed as a model organism, is one of the most widely used model organisms in biological research.