John Amory has a sense of humor about his job. You can tell by the mostly sheepish grin that rolls across his face when he's asked about the particulars of his latest experiment.
Peter Mumford
Amory believes a male birth-control pill (or topical equivalent) can help curb world poverty.
Peter Mumford
These are sperm, as they look on a UW lab computer.
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Inside his small office on the University of Washington Medical Center campus, the 42-year-old "humble general internist" pulls up a video demonstration on his computer and begins a play-by-play. Every scientific study presents a set of challenges that researchers have to think their way around, he says.
In this case, it was figuring out how to persuade your average male rabbit to ejaculate into an artificial vagina.
A figure appears on Amory's computer screen. It's Amory himself, though you'd probably never know it. Like other MDs roaming the halls at UW, he has sensibly cut, slightly graying hair. His pants are often of the slacks variety, and his button-down shirts are mildly rumpled. Onscreen, he's shown only from the neck down, without a glimpse of his face or any other distinguishing features. Instead, there's just the anonymous torso and his test subjects: two very large white rabbits.
As the video starts, Amory holds a glass receptacle in his protective-gloved hands. Sufficiently aroused by his female counterpart, the male rabbit shuffles toward the front of the cage only to be quite literally cockblocked by Amory's outstretched arm and the waiting glass beaker he holds in his hand. The trick to fooling the rabbit into actually doing the deed is heating the top cover to 42 degrees Celsius, the exact temperature of a female rabbit's vagina—a solution born of a lot of trial and error, says Amory.
The whole process takes less than a minute. "Hence the phrase 'quick like a bunny,'" Amory deadpans.
Amory is a professor and research fellow at UW's Center for Research in Reproduction and Contraception. Back in 1977, his boss and mentor, Dr. William Bremner, helped found the Center with a grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH). Three decades on, the University of Washington, through the Center, has become a veritable mecca for researchers interested in the study of the male reproductive system. After 13 years of toiling in the labs in the bowels of the hospital, Amory is now a full-fledged member of a small but international fraternity of researchers who are determined to accomplish something that medical scientists have failed at despite decades of effort: engineering a male birth-control pill.
Amory takes sophomoric reactions to his research in stride. He's heard all the jokes. He works with sperm—feel free to snicker. Afterward, he'll earnestly recite the manifold reasons why the world's male population could use another contraceptive option.
According to estimates by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, 40 percent of the three million pregnancies that occur in the U.S. each year are unintended, and 40 percent of those end in abortion. Currently, the world population sits at around 6.5 billion. Most projections predict that number climbing to 8.9 billion by 2050.
This is just one of a handful of reasons why, 13 years ago, Amory joined Bremner in the worldwide effort to create an alternative to existing male contraceptive methods: condoms, vasectomies, and withdrawal. "Half of all population growth is through unintended pregnancy," says Amory, seated in his office at UW. "If you could really get contraception out there that was 100 percent effective, you could pretty well curb those numbers. You could stabilize the populations, and that would in effect help curb energy consumption. And if you're not expending untold amounts of resources on that, you can actually focus on the alleviation of poverty, and nutrition, the stuff that actually would make people's lives better."
After nearly 50 years of trying, scientists still haven't come up with an alternative form of male contraception, as there are a multitude of obstacles to work around. First, there's biology. The female version of the pill uses estrogen to trick the body into not ovulating. Many other chemical-based male contraceptive methods work in much the same way, using synthetic hormones to prevent the body from producing sperm. But the female pill's job is easier by comparison: stop the production of a single egg just once each month. Men's testes produce 1,000 sperm per second, and scientists haven't developed a pill formulation that can guarantee men the 99.9 percent effectiveness rate boasted by the female version of the pill.
"Ask any researcher—you can't sell men on a contraceptive that is any less effective than the female pill, no matter how convenient it is to take," says Amory.
Then there's the ebb and flow of interest from the pharmaceutical industry, which, after a free-spending period in the early aughts, has since scaled back its funding of research efforts. As Amory speculates, that decision may have stemmed from the belief that the untold millions it takes to fund this kind of research couldn't be recouped in the open market.
Of course, some people don't buy the rationale that market forces and scientific limitations are the only reasons a pill hasn't materialized. As Nelly Oudshoorn notes in The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making, feminist health advocates have long complained that the reasons behind the lack of innovation in contraceptive science have more to do with a supposedly predominant belief among men that the responsibility for handling contraception should rightly fall to women.
