Morford: Male birth control is already here. Guess who's blocking it? [View all]

[niyad]

Male birth control is already here. Guess who’s blocking it?

By Mark Morford on May 1, 2017 at 1:45 PM



The maverick: Professor Sujoy Guha


Women have lots of contraceptive options, none of them very good and all with lots of room for improvement


One simple shot, and it's done. One more, and it's undone.



All your suspicions are probably correct. All your most depressing hunches about capitalism’s true nature usually prove, in many cases, all too true.Shall we sum it up, one more time? It goes something like this:
Just because a brilliant, relatively simple invention would save lives, shift the global paradigm, upend the lopsided, hugely unfair gender/procreation dynamic, help curb global overpopulation and diminish multiple, long-standing cultural and religious stigmas, doesn’t mean capitalism can let it happen. Why? You already know why.

Take, for one fine and telling example: birth control for men. Have you heard? It’s done. It’s ready. It’s safe, it works, it’s simple and easy and extremely affordable and it was invented in rural India by a maverick, 76-year-old biomedical engineer named Sujoy Guha at a tiny, scruffy biomedical startup, because all the big pharma monoliths across the planet have worked very hard to block, halt, stall, balk at researching it for themselves. It’s a tremendous threat, you see, to their female-contraception profits. And, as we are all reminded nearly every single day, capitalism’s No. 1 rule is forever inviolable: No one and nothing – not childbirth, not disease, not the environment, not human health or love or humanitarian progress – nothing f—ks with the bottom line.

Behold, the sad-but-still-hopeful tale of RISUG, (“reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance”), as reported by Bloomberg (though Wired reported on it as far back as 2011). RISUG is a gel that, once injected into a man’s scrotum in a simple, one-time, 15-minute outpatient procedure, stays put for years and knock’s out sperm’s viability, until another simple injection reverses it.It really does appear to be just that simple, just that inspired. And the story of Guha’s invention is one full of bravery and smarts, scrappy industriousness and genuine concern for the fate of humanity.



$3 billion a year in profits, and everyone hates them. RISUG could change everything

Not that you’d know it in the West. Despite RISUG’s obvious, world-altering potential to completely upend the way we think about contraception, population control and who can now take responsibility for what, no major U.S. pharma will go near it. Not because it’s dangerous. Not because it’s untested. Not because it would require relatively little in the way of further clinical trials in U.S. to get it approved. And not only because all U.S. pharma companies are run by rich, middle-aged white guys who are so monstrously limited in imagination, so entirely lacking in, well, balls, they all collectively freak out at the idea of trying to market what amounts to a tiny, one-time needle-shot into their precious man-bits.

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http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2017/05/01/male-birth-control-is-already-here-guess-whos-blocking-it/#photo-792747