Slashdot Mirror
Reversible Male Contraception With Gold Nanorods
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."
It might be non-surgical but a needle in the nads followed up by laser heating isn't my idea of fun.
Gives a whole new meaning to the term "money shot"...
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?
leading to reduced fertility
That's not difficult at all. Diet, temperatures, radiation, hormone therapy, steroids, and apparently mountain dew can all do that. 100% stopping fertility is the hard part. This discovery is absolutely nothing. "Reduced" fertility is not good enough and never will be. "This sort of works" is not a good marketing strategy for contraceptives. In women you try to stop 1 cell from doing something. In men, you have to stop 100% of trillions. It's basically impossible.
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 ....
If a contraception method is 99.9% effective in its effect on procreative cells, for a female it means that out of the 500 eggs she may produce in her life, maybe one has a 50% chance to be fertilized (if taken at the right time, etc). Acceptable risk. For a male, it means that out of the 300 millions sperms contained in the average ejaculation, there will still be 300 thousand standing up in lines at Egg's door. That's one of the reasons why it's much more difficult to design a male contraceptive.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Did you hear about the birth control pill for men?
A man puts it in his shoe and it makes him limp.
Injection in the testicle? No thanks. I'll take the injection in the Vas Deferens of Vasalgel, thank you. That is also closer to commercial use (human trials scheduled for this year, release targeted 2015) and has over 10 years worth of human testing in India. It is also reversible (USA rabbit reversal trial in progress right now) with a single injection of baking soda & water.
FALSE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasectomy_reversal
(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
Vasectomy reversal is difficult, expensive, and only works about half the time. I think it's pretty clear that the summary was referring to something with reversibility as a design point, not a workaround...
BPAS cites the average pregnancy success rate of a vasectomy reversal is around 55% if performed within 10 years, and drops to 25% if performed over 10 years
From the same article:
BPAS cites the average pregnancy success rate of a vasectomy reversal is around 55% if performed within 10 years, and drops to 25% if performed over 10 years.
95% successful at producing some viable sperm, but if its been >10 years only 25% effective at producing offspring.
And its most successful reversal rate is within 3 years, which, quite frankly, why bother with surgery you plan to reverse in 3 years?!
And ~that~ combined is what makes it impractical as effective male birth control. In an ideal world you get get one at 15 and then reliably reverse it at 25-30 when you want kids. But by that point you are well into 75% of it not working well enough to get anyone pregnant territory.
Its great once you are -done- having children, but if you plan to have children in the future... not so much.
When I was 21 my girlfriend accidentally got pregnant, miscarried, and almost died. At that time vasectomy reversals were new, cost about $10,000-$15,000, and had a 70% success rate. My thought process was 1) technology only gets better, 2) if I couldn't afford $15,000 for a reversal then I certainly couldn't afford a kid, 3) I never wanted to go through another miscarriage, so I got a vasectomy. It also had the unintended effect of 4) I got laid a lot more often than guys who were still fertile.
Six years later I went to get it reversed. The technology was now well-established, and microsurgery was becoming commonplace. It now cost $15,000-$25,000. The claimed success rate was still 70%. Both attempts were complete failures, as were over a dozen attempts at artificial insemination. It's been fifteen years now, and we no longer regret not having kids, but it took Rosa a long time to come to terms with our mutual infertility.
TLDR; never, ever, assume a sterilization procedure is reversible.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
There is already a long-standing, reversible male birth control method called RISUG
RISUG employs an injection into the vas deferens of a copolymer which can be removed at anytime via a second injection of bicarbonate solution. The copolymer is believed to hold a matrix of stable ions which rupture sperm as they pass the affected part of the vas deferens. Decades of testing have shown the method to be almost completely effective. Because the sperm still exit the body, no immune response to built-up sperm develops (the major reason vasectomies are generally irreversible). I know an injection sounds scary, but it's with high gauge needle and a local anesthetic, and one injection would provide 5 - 10 years of protection (depending on amount of material).
Sounds a lot better (more effective, more reversible, less likely to have complications) to me than putting gold nanorods in your balls and heating them with a laser...
.: Semper Absurda
I've read that the mechanism of the irreversibility is that the immune system begins destroying the sperm, which can no longer exit the body. Makes sense given the timelines you quoted.
The ideal method you're looking for is probably RISUG, which has the qualities you seek - nearly 100% effective, lasts 5-10 years, totally reversible (with fertility restored in days - weeks). Also, an injection into the vas deferens sounds a lot better than one in the balls (to me anyway).
.: Semper Absurda