LITTLE BLUE PILL

It started out as a possible cure for high blood pressure, then angina, and finally turned out to be a lifeline for men with erectile dysfunction. Viagra has come a long way over the past 30 years 

- GUY KELLY

ONCE the formal questionnaires are complete, there’s an open inquiry at the end of almost any clinical trial. A variation on: “Apart from the answers you’ve given, did you notice anything else worthy of mention?” Often the question is met with a blank.

But in the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil in 1993, the former miners testing a potential new drug for angina and hypertension did feel moved to speak up. One man raised his hand.

“I seemed to have a lot more erections during the night than normal,” he said with admirable candour.

The others smiled and, one by one, said, “So did I.”

It’s not known what would have happened if that first brave man hadn’t piped up. Dr David Brown has a pretty good idea, though. “Well, Viagra wouldn’t have been invented, basically.”

The story of the drug sildenafil, later sold as Viagra (among other things) and marketed, ingeniously, as simply “the little blue pill”, is one of happen stance and determination – with a hefty dose of unexpected charm. Plenty of medicines can claim to have changed the world, but 30 years after its invention and 25 years after it was first sold, few have made the cultural impact of Viagra.

Fewer are still so widely taken yet so seldom openly discussed. That the invention of this magic pill for impotence was an accident – a phenomenally happy one, not just for the millions of men who needed it, and their partners, but also for the profit margins of Pfizer, the company that created it – is part of its mythology.