By ScienceNOW, *Science*NOW
After decades of promising starts and dead ends, there's still no male equivalent of the female birth control pill. It's just not that easy to make an effective, safe, cheap, targeted, well-tolerated, bioavailable, easy-to-manufacture, side-effect-free, and (whew) completely reversible drug to block the production of sperm cells.
In the past few years, though, biologists have opened up some new genetic and molecular leads for disrupting spermatogenesis, and there's optimism among reproductive scientists again. How close are we to the male pill this time? What pathways look promising? And will men really take it?
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*This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal *Science.