Selmar Aschheim

Selmar Aschheim (1878 to 1965) was a German gynecologist born into a Jewish family in Berlin. He received his doctorate of medicine at Freiburg in 1902, later directed the laboratory of the university women's clinic at the Berlin Charite, and in 1930 took the chair of biological research in gynecology at the University of Berlin. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and continued medical research in Paris at the Hopital Beaujon. Aschheim specialised in gynecological histology and hormone research. In 1928, with the endocrinologist Bernhard Zondek, he isolated the gonadotropic hormone human chorionic gonadotropin from the urine of pregnant women, and their work produced the Aschheim-Zondek pregnancy test, in which a patient's urine was injected into an immature mouse and an estrous reaction signalled pregnancy. They first believed the hormone came from the pituitary; later research in the 1940s showed the placenta produces it.