"The male Pill is coming - and it's going to change everything"

"New forms of male contraception are estimated to hit the market in a few years and - unlike women's options - most won't contain hormones."

"I, a feminist father of the Pill, foresee no male Pill"

That's Carl Djerassi, in a not-so-new "Wired Magazine" article which I missed last fall:

Scientifically, we know how to create a male Pill. Yet despite much clinical research, the top 20 pharmaceutical companies have shown zero interest in taking such a product to market. Aside from big pharma's focus on older people (a resounding "yes" on treatment for erectile function, an equally resounding "no" for contraception), the biggest problem is the fact that a young man's reproductive span is two to three times longer than a 20-year-old woman's. 

A young woman will not ask whether continued use of her Pill would affect her fertility at 45 or 50, whereas many 20-year-old men would require a guaranteed answer. To provide an epidemiologically valid answer to a young man would be expensive, time-consuming (thus cannibalising most of the potential patent life) and open to lawsuits, since men may blame their Pill for age-related erectile dysfunction and prostate-gland problems. Link

Djerassi is an interesting man in his own right. I wrote a bit about him back here, Djerassic Perk, in which I incorrectly predicted that he would win the Chemistry Nobel Prize. Every year, I still wonder why not. He's over 90 years old now and won't be around forever.

Djerassi has his share of detractors, but the Pill has certainly had important social consequences. Then there apparently is an Austrian newspaper interview in which he regrets some of the subsequent demographic changes his co-invention wrought. You can read about that here. I'll bet the original article is in German and I'd like to get my hands on it.