What Do We Have To Do To Get The Male Pill?

Male birth control could be a multibillion-dollar business. Here’s why it isn’t.

- Emily Anthes

The trouble began, as it so often does, with a bottle of Chivas Regal.

Back in the 1950s, scientists at Sterling Drug, a now- defunct pharmaceutical company, synthesized a class of chemicals that made male rats temporarily infertile. They thought they might be onto something big: the first-ever birth control pill—for men. After identifying several promising compounds, including one known as WIN 18,446, a trio of researchers began testing them on a ready population, inmates at the Oregon State Penitentiary.

The results were astonishing. Within 12 weeks, the inmates’ sperm counts had plummeted. When the men stopped taking the drugs, sperm production returned to normal. Better yet, they experienced few side effects.

Then one of the participants drank some contraband Scotch and became unusually, violently ill. He confessed his transgression to the researchers, and follow-up studies confirmed his account: WIN 18,446 didn’t mix well with booze. Men who combined the two reported heart palpitations, sweating, nausea, and vomiting. The research was quietly abandoned.

For years, headlines have promised an imminent breakthrough in male contraception. Time and again, these efforts have fallen short. Last October, for instance, researchers reported that a hormone cocktail they’d been testing curbed sperm production and prevented pregnancies. But they’d had to halt the study early because men were reporting troubling side effects, including mood changes and depression.