It has been 'near' to release since I was a teenager, well ok, since before I was born.
It was first talked about in the 1950's around the time of the female pill. It crops up every few years then vanishes again for a few more years.
Not going to happen anytime soon, for a whole number of reasons.
There is a book on the subject:
The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making
Nelly Oudshoorn
Oudshoorn emphasizes that the introduction of contraceptives for men depends to a great extent on changing ideas about reproductive responsibility. Initial interest in the male pill, she shows, came from outside the scientific community: from the governments of China and India, which were interested in population control, and from Western feminists, who wanted the responsibilities and health risks associated with contraception shared more equally between the sexes. She documents how in the 1970s, the World Health Organization took the lead in investigating male contraceptives by coordinating an unprecedented, worldwide research network. She chronicles how the search for a male pill required significant reorganization of drug-testing standards and protocols and of the family-planning infrastructure—including founding special clinics for men, creating separate spaces for men within existing clinics, enrolling new professionals, and defining new categories of patients. The Male Pill is ultimately a story as much about the design of masculinities in the last decades of the twentieth century as it is about the development of safe and effective technologies.
review, from here:
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=s ... ushul.html
The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making. By Nelly Oudshoorn. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+306. $21.95.
Nelly Oudshoorn traces the history of efforts to develop a male counterpart to the Pill, the G. D. Searle corporation's synthetic progesterone antiovulent that was approved for general use by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. She divides her story into two parts—"Overcoming Resistance: Constructing Alternative Sociotechnical Networks" and "Configuring the User: Articulating and Performing Masculinities"—and seeks an understanding of why there is no male equivalent of the hormonal contraceptive pill for women.
In the first half of the book Oudshoorn focuses on advocates of male contraceptive drugs, the efforts of international public-sector agencies to include males in the contraceptive agenda, research and development of male contraceptives outside of the drug industry, synthesis of hormonal contraceptive compounds, infrastructure for clinical testing, and the effect of risk on testing. The second part, which examines integration of male contraceptives into the culture of birth control, includes chapters on family-planning policies, infrastructures for clinical trials, journalistic accounts, and the role of pharmaceutical companies.
Oudshoorn begins by declaring that male reproductive bodies are making headlines "for the first time in history," due to the immense popularity of the erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra. Other timely, albeit far-less-newsworthy topics include research on the decline in male fertility due to pollution, testosterone therapy for aging men, and the thirty-year quest for a male hormonal contraceptive. Historians generally avoid absolutes. Certainly Viagra garnered headlines, but is Oudshoorn trying to say that overt discussion of erectile dysfunction has a connection to interest in developing a male contraceptive pill? If so, she must mean a spike in interest, since the male pill is by no means a novel concept. China's Chou En-lai promoted the male pill during the late 1960s. This led to research on gossypol, a polyphenol derived from the cottonseed plant, with a known contraceptive effect in males. After China opened up in 1979, Western scientists learned that fourteen thousand males were participating in a clinical trial of gossypol. Gossypol's 99.89-percent effectiveness prompted Upjohn to begin animal tests. The Chinese experiments ended abruptly in 1980, when it was revealed that gossypol had toxic side effects including diarrhea, circulatory problems, heart failure, and permanent sterility. Interestingly, this did not prevent the World Health Organization (WHO) from collaborating with China on both gossypol and vasectomies. The former was terminated in 1990 when researchers decided against clinical testing of synthesized gossypol analogs.
Oudshoorn argues that the WHO, despite its failure in China, did manage to support development of long-acting androgen injections during the early 1980s. This research took place outside of channels normally controlled by pharmaceutical companies. As a result, the WHO was unable to attract the backing of companies necessary to undertake large-scale clinical testing of the new contraceptive.
Clinical testing of steroids for male contraception actually dates to the late 1950s when testosterone and progesterone preparations were administered to twenty prisoners at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Though not specifically designed to test contraceptive effect, data from the experiment prompted researchers to note that all subjects lost their sexual desire as well as their ability to have an erection and to produce semen. Libido and potency concerns dogged continued clinical testing throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Testing scaled up to large groups during the 1990s and gravitated toward the use of combined hormonal compounds as a way to resolve the problem of interference with sexual function. Perhaps the most significant understanding that emerged from these tests was that the goal of azoospermia (zero sperm count) was unattainable. Indeed, further tests of subjects with low sperm concentrations (oligospermia) demonstrated that hormonal contraceptives were statistically less reliable than condoms.
Another strike against the...
Register
Login
FAQ
Search
