Hillel Abbe Shapiro

Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, in his 'Pregnancy testing in Britain, c.1900-67 : laboratories, animals and demand from doctors, patients and consumers', investigated the controversy in detail

On returning from London, Shapiro was employed as government pharmacologist of the Biological Control Laboratories at the Union Health Department in Cape Town.

Hillel Abbe Shapiro (2 February 1909 – 31 October 1984) was a South African forensic pathologist with a range of specialisms in experimental physiology and forensic medicine.

He was editor of medical journals, medical text books and a university lecturer.

Hillel Shapiro's parents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Cape Town, South Africa, and he was born and grew up in Somerset Strand where he attended Somerset West High School in the Cape Provence.

Yiddish was the only language spoken by his parents, so Shapiro had to learn English and Afrikaans and he became fluent in both.

After school matriculation, his linguistic interests led to him studying Latin and English at the University of Cape Town, graduating BA with distinction in English.

After this first degree, he studied for an MA in ethnology, social anthropology and archaeology, receiving first class passes in all these subjects, as well as the class medal in ethnology and archaeology and he worked at the False Bay coast on the excavation of kitchen middens at Gordon's Bay.

With a growing interest in archaeology, he enrolled on courses in human anatomy and biology.

The Head of the Department of Zoology was Lancelot Hogben who suggested to Shapiro that his journey into biology would be more successful with a knowledge of physics and chemistry; so in 1930 Shapiro enrolled on the first year of the medical course.

He began biological experimentation while still a first-year medical student.

By feeding thyroid glands to tadpoles, he observed the accelerated metamorphosis induced by this endocrine gland.

The use of live South African female Xenopus frogs was common in Europe, the US and Australia from the 1930s and through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s for testing human pregnancy.

This early pregnancy test had been developed by Shapiro and Zwarenstein and it worked by injecting the urine from a human female into the Xenopus laevis frog - the frog would ovulate if the urine had come from a pregnant woman.

From page 45: 'Hogben's communication (1930) would later be taken to have shown in principle that Xenopus might be used as an indicator of the presence of gonadotrophins in the urine of pregnant women, but neither this nor the full report (Hogben et al., 1931) mentioned pregnancy testing.

He appears initially to have had other priorities, and it was at the outset far from clear that it would prove possible to make Xenopus the test animal of choice.'

Edward Elkin attributed the pregnancy test to a number of researchers.

But his initial research was into amphibian metabolism, with his Ph.D. awarded in 1933 for 'Studies in the calcium metabolism of the amphibian'.

In a report to the 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, 1933).

In addition, the test was used to diagnose chorion epithelioma and testicular tumours.

The Shapiro–Zwarenstein pregnancy test received international recognition and Xenopus laevis frogs were exported all over the world from the Cape.

From page 46 of their review: 'In a preliminary report to the 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 May 1934 Nature carried an excerpt from this report (Shapiro and Zwarenstein, 1933) '.

As a result of his research work carried out during the fifth year of medical study, he was in 1935 awarded the Science Research Scholarship of the Royal Commission (the 1851 Exhibition Science Research Scholarship).

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He was the first South African medical student to be awarded this Science Research Scholarship.

He undertook research at the Medical Research Council laboratories in London, under the guidance of the Nobel laureate Sir Henry Dale.

His medical training was a route into experimental physiology.

His mentor Lancelot Hogben influenced him to pursue research.

He was also guided by the advice of Harry Zwarenstein, with whom he was later to co-operate in developing the Xenopus laevis pregnancy test.

In 1939, he interrupted this employment to complete his medical studies, graduating M.B. Ch.B. in December that year.

He then moved to the health department's medico-legal laboratories as a forensic pathologist and in October 1943 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and was a lecturer in medical jurisprudence at Cape Town University until 1948, when he left to take up the editorship of the South African Medical Journal.

The 16 November 1946 edition of the British Medical Journal includes a letter to the BMJ from Shapiro and Zwarenstein clarifying that Hogben and his associates were retrospectively wrongly claiming credit for discovering the pregnancy test first.

On pages 45 and 46 of a review titled ‘The introduction of Xenopus laevis into developmental biology: of empire, pregnancy testing and ribosomal genes’ by John B. Gurdon of the Wellcome CRC Institute and Nick Hopwood of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, the authors elaborate on this controversy in detail:

He chaired numerous medical conferences and symposiums, including from 13 to 16 July 1968, the first Human Heart Transplantation Symposium in Cape Town that followed on soon after the first heart transplant had successfully been done by Christiaan Barnard on 3 December 1967.

The latter part of his career mostly involved editing medical journals, consultant and expert witness work in criminal trials, and appearing for the surviving families in inquests into suspicious deaths of detainees in police custody during the Apartheid years.

Shapiro was married to educational psychologist Sonia Machanick, founder of Japari School, and they had four children, Janice, Paul, Roy and Ian.

Together with his wife and a group of other parents, he was a founder of South Africa's first multi-racial high school, Woodmead School, which his two younger children then attended.