Tears, Sweat & Spit

Will the baby be a boy or a girl? A biochemist at Chicago's Loyola University, Gustav William Rapp, thinks he can find the answer, nine times out of ten, and three to four months before birth. The answer, he believes, is in the mother's saliva.

Dr. Rapp got the idea in a roundabout way from Dr. Garwood Richardson's simple urine test for pregnancy (TIME, May 2, 1949). Rapp decided to see whether any secretions besides urine showed pregnancy. He tried tears and sweat, found them no good. Saliva seemed to be a flop, too: half the results were negative, even with women known to be pregnant. Dr. Rapp decided to forget about it, and put the work aside.

Some time later, an idea struck him: perhaps those "false negative" tests had been telling him something, after all. He checked the hospital records of 50 cases, found that all the "negatives" had had girls, the "positives" had had boys. Rapp's hypothesis: a male fetus releases male hormones into the mother's system--in sufficient quantity to be detected in saliva.

To check his theory, Dr. Rapp has since tested 400 women five to six months pregnant, and 92% of his predictions have been right. (The test is no good for diabetic women, and can be thrown off by drugs such as aspirin.) Dr. Rapp still considers his findings "preliminary." But recently, when his wife had a baby son, her doctor came hustling out of the delivery room with the happy news that Rapp was right again.

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