8mo ago

Male birth control breakthrough safely switches off fit sperm for a while

newatlas.com Male birth control breakthrough safely switches off fit sperm for a while

A non-hormonal, reversible and non-toxic male birth control could be a step closer, with scientists successfully targeting a protein that's crucial in making fertile sperm. Knocking this protein out for a period of time would give men control over their protection window, much like oral…

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A “numbers game”? Do you think there are little men in your balls, strangulating every sperm cell when it's formed? Or… do you think the pill works by somehow interfering with the ovum itself?
Because it doesn't. Quite the opposite. Just as male contraception methods don't try to kill sperm, but to shut down the factory. Besides: You cannot measure the difficulty or complexity of medical procedures by how many cells are affected. By that logic, brain surgery would be way easier to do than amputating a leg.
- What I meant is that it's easier to ensure it works being a numbers game. If you constantly have new sperm being made it's way harder to shut that down consistently than to stop one egg releasing once per month.
  
  That's not how any of this works. Did you never take reproductive anatomy?
  
  No. Where would I take that?
  
  In school. But I'm sure you could gather the essentials from the internet.
  
  We had sex ed but we never went really deep.
  
  Let me put it this way, with an imperfect analogy. If you poison the water supply, it doesn't matter how many people drink from it. They all die.

302 comments