Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS[1] FRSE (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician.

[1] 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.

[3] 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 knew that the ox extract chemically resembled human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), a hormone released by pregnant women.

Hogben's claim to have discovered the Xenopus pregnancy test was disputed by two South African researchers, Hillel Shapiro and Harry Zwarenstein.

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[15] in South Africa[16] 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.

[17] Shapiro and Zwarenstein's letter published in the British Medical Journal on 16 November 1946[18] 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.

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 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.

[10] Inspired by the example of The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, Hogben began to work on books designed to popularize mathematics and science for the general public.

Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables (...)Professor Hogben plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions (...)In 1918 Hogben married the mathematician, statistician, socialist and feminist Enid Charles from Denbigh with whom he had two sons and two daughters.

Widowed by the death of Jane in 1974, he died at the War Memorial Hospital at Wrexham[3] in 1975 aged 79 and was cremated at nearby Pentre Bychan.

He 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.

In terms of scientific practice, modern research on phenotypic plasticity, gene-environment interaction, and developmental systems theory all owes much to the legacy of Hogben's initial emphasis on understanding nature and nurture interdependently rather than in dichotomy.

The Lancelot Thomas Hogben papers are held in Special Collections Archived 28 August 2009 at the Wayback Machine, University of Birmingham.

Archive highlights include a draft of his autobiography (later edited and published by his son Adrian Hogben and his wife), correspondence, hand drawn diagrams for his books, and reflections on his life and works.