BBC
In 1968, a young man visited his psychiatrist with an awkward observation. He had been taking the drug thioridazine to treat schizophrenia, when he noticed something unusual: his orgasms had become “dry”.
Nearly three decades later, the story became the inspiration for a sensational new idea – could a similar drug form the basis of a male contraceptive pill? Eventually researchers discovered another drug with the same ejaculation-suppressing effect, the blood pressure mediation phenoxybenzamine. Neither drug would be safe enough to give to healthy men on its own, but the idea was to find out how they worked – then recreate this mechanism using something else.
Cue many years of research and development – that is, until the therapy hit a major snag.
Though a safe, effective male pill would have the potential to finally unburden women of the responsibility for contraception, and prevent millions of unwanted pregnancies every year, some men found the idea of an invisible orgasm distinctly unappealing. For a proportion of men, the so-called “clean sheets” pill was seen as emasculating. The method eventually lost its funding, and researchers went back to the drawing board (more on this later).
Today the male contraceptive pill is still yet to materialise. This week, research in mice identified a promising new target – a molecular switch that can stun sperm for two hours, rendering its taker temporarily infertile. But though the protein has been hailed as a game-changer, it still has a long way to go before it is approved for use in humans.
In fact, finding effective drugs has never been the problem.
Over the last half century, numerous possible methods for male birth control have been proposed, including some that have made it to clinical trials in humans. However, each one has eventually met a brick wall – even those that are safe and effective have been written off due to undesirable side effects. Several male pills have been rejected on the grounds that they lead to symptoms that are extremely common among women taking female versions.
Why is it so difficult to get approval for male contraceptive pills? And are the challenges more cultural than scientific?
