Am I pregnant? There have been methods to answer this question dating all the way back to the ancient Egyptians in 1350 BCE. Methods became more advanced over time, but they remained largely unreliable until there was a greater understanding of the hormonal and chemical changes that occur in the female body during pregnancy. In the 1960s and 70s the National Institute of Health become one of the foremost places in the entire world to conduct such research, due to a combination of proper funding, expertise, and the ability to conduct what, in many settings, would be considered very tedious work due to the difficulty of extracting and synthesizing hormones.

Such a place would attract Judith Vaitukaitis and Glenn Braunstein, both medical residents in Boston, who would start doing fundamental research to understand human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), a hormone that was known to be linked to pregnancy and certain types of cancers. Vaitukaitis and Braunstein would come to understand more about the structure of hCG, and subsequently, develop more advanced tools to detect hCG. These findings would lead to the development of the first at home early pregnancy test, which would give women a safe and reliable way to determine pregnancy as early as 8-10 days post conception.