Bernhard Zondek

Bernhard Zondek (1891 to 1966) was a German-born Israeli gynecologist who developed the first reliable pregnancy test in 1928. Born in Wronke, now Wronki in Poland, he studied medicine in Berlin, graduating in 1919, and specialized in obstetrics and gynecology at the Charité. After the Nazis dismissed him from his posts in 1933 he went briefly to Sweden, where his request for a practitioner's license met organized hostility, and in 1934 he moved to Mandatory Palestine as professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and head of the department at Hadassah Hospital. His work with Selmar Aschheim produced the Aschheim-Zondek test, a bioassay for human chorionic gonadotropin, and he argued that the endocrine glands depend on one another under pituitary control. He received the Israel Prize in medicine in 1958.