Reproductive grail: Why the male pill remains out of reach
Industry joke is that oral contraceptive for men has been five years away for the past 40 years as scientists’ efforts have failed time and again
The trouble began, as it so often does, with a bottle of Chivas Regal. In the 1950s, scientists at Sterling Drug, a now defunct pharmaceutical company, synthesised a class of chemicals that made male rats temporarily infertile. They thought they might be on to something big: the first birth control pill — for men. After identifying several promising compounds including one known as WIN 18,446, researchers began testing them on inmates at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Within 12 weeks, the inmates’ sperm counts had plummeted. When they stopped taking the drugs, sperm production returned to normal. They experienced few side effects. Then one of the participants drank contraband Scotch and became violently ill. Follow-up studies confirmed WIN 18,446 didn’t mix well with booze. The research was abandoned. Time and again, efforts to produce a male contraceptive have fallen short. In October 2016, researchers reported that a hormone cocktail they’d been testing had curbed sperm production...
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