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Reversible Male Contraception With Gold Nanorods

Posted by timothy on from the pickup-lines-suggest-themselves dept.

MTorrice writes "Men's options for birth control have significant downsides: Condoms are not as effective as hormonal methods for women, and vasectomies require surgery and are irreversible. Doctors and scientists have for decades searched for more effective and desirable male contraception techniques. Researchers in China now propose a nonsurgical, reversible, and low-cost method. They show that infrared laser light heats up gold nanorods injected into mice testes, leading to reduced fertility (abstract) in the animals."

5 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Non-surgical by OptimalCynic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It might be non-surgical but a needle in the nads followed up by laser heating isn't my idea of fun.

    1. Re:Non-surgical by Grisstle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not to mention "decreased fertility" I don't want to decrease my fertility, I want to temporarily eliminate my fertility.

  2. Significant downsides? by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Forgive me if I see "gold nanorods injected into my testes" as being a "significant downside" in and of itself. This coming from a guy who was snipped 10 years ago with non-working anesthetic.

    --
    Do you have ESP?
  3. Re:Balls of gold! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Finally! I don't have to trust that ding-bat I picked up to remember to take her pill!

    You'd also better hope that she doesn't have Aids or Herpes or anti biotic resistant Syphilis or ....

  4. Title is misleading by argStyopa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    (from TFA):
    "In a lower hyperthermia treatment, the morphology of testes and seminiferous tubules is only partly injured, and fertility indices are decreased to 10% at day 7, then recovered to 50% at day 60. In a higher hyperthermia treatment, the morphology of testes and seminiferous tubules are totally destroyed, and fertility indices are decreased to 0 at day 7."

    In other words, the 'reversible' (or more accurately temporary suppression of fertility) process drops fertility down to 10%. As an actual birth control process, 10% fertility might as well be 90%.

    The elimination of fertility by this method - ie to 0% - seems to be irreversible.

    So the process is more accurately a method of male sterilization (for which it may indeed be valuable, if it's less invasive, less painful, etc. than vasectomy); the "contraceptive" role seems to be far less reliable than current methods by at least one, perhaps two orders of magnitude.

    Only by the most extreme hyperbole could this be called "reversible male contraception".

    --
    -Styopa