December 11, 2005

hCG

I don't understand why they have to put the h in hCG if they know they're talking about humans anyway. As opposed to what? cCG (Chicken Chorionic Gonadotropin), dCG (Donkey Chorionic Gonadotropin), gCG (Giraffe Chorionic Gonadotropin) ??? Even though I don't know why they don't just call it CG*, I know that Jen has quite a bit of it going on right now. :)

*Actually, I do know why they don't call it just CG, beacuse people would confuse it with Computer Graphics. Silly medical acronyms...

1 comment:

Rutherford said...

Check up on this, but here's my answer. In the old days, to see if a woman was pregnant, some of her urine was injected into a rabbit. Now, the most common story told goes with the phrase "The rabbit died" meaning that a woman is pregnant. 99.99% of people who understand the meaning of the phrase will tell you that the injection killed the rabbit if indeed the woman was pregnant. The truth is that the rabbit died an untimely death whether the woman was pregnant or not. The reason is that the test works in that the hCG in the urine causes the ovaries to undergo cellular changes that require dissection to be seen. So the rabbit was killed in any case. I think the hCG may have been marked with an h in order to separate it from rabbit hCG. I have no evidence for that last sentence at all, and in fact, I now wonder why I wrote all this. Just wondering, I guess.