Okay, here is a guy who has never heard of withdrawal...
Women have a variety of methods for contraception, but only two methods are commonly available to men: condoms and vasectomies. Both methods have their drawbacks.
(And let's just not mention the very PiV-centric model going on here.)
But that wasn't actually the main that struck me about this: Heating Up Testicles With Nanoparticles Can Work as Male Contraception. Here's How.
Because I have a distant recollection of coming across Ye Urban Folklore in the Dayz of My Yoof about men warming up the relevant parts as a preliminary precautionary measure (mind you, there was also the thing about strapping the luminous-dialled watch to them for a dose of radiation for the same purpose). In Hunter Davies' 1965 novel, Here We Go, Round the Mulberry Bush, lads commend to one another taking a hot bath immediately before getting into a leg-over situation, and also the watch thing, with warnings not to leave it too long for fear of permanent infertility.
Plus, of course, with slightly more medical and scientific cred, men who wanted to beget offspring and were having difficulty due to lowish sperm count were told to cast off tight underpants that overheated the organs. Nanocontraception is based on the idea that nanoparticles - here, about 100 nanometres in diameter, or roughly one-thousandth the width of a piece of paper or of a strand of human hair - can somehow be delivered to the testicles, where they can be warmed. If you could warm up the testicles just a bit, you would have a way to turn sperm production on and off at will because the warmer they get, the less fertile they become. But it's a delicate process because the testicles can be irreversibly destroyed if they become too warm; the tissue dies and can no longer produce sperm, even when the testicles return to their normal temperature.
Experiments have been done on mice, and, I'm sorry, it sounds inordinately complicated and reminiscent of Michael Bentine's Newer Better Mouse-Trap: [M]agnetic nanoparticles were injected into mice's veins, and then the animals were anesthetized. A magnet was then placed next to their testicles for four hours, drawing the nanoparticles there. This procedure - injection followed by magnetic targeting - was performed daily for one to four days. After the last day of treatment, an electric coil was wrapped around the testicles, through which a current was passed. This induced a magnetic field that heated up the nanorods and, therefore, the testicles. Similar temperature increases - from a baseline of 29 C to between 37 and 42 C - were observed through this method. The more days a mouse had been injected with nanorods, the hotter its testicles became. Hotter testicles led to their atrophy and shrinkage, but they showed gradual recovery both 30 and 60 days after treatment as long as testicle temperatures didn't reach 45 C. Fertility was down seven days after treatment - in some cases, fertility was completely eliminated - but it also showed gradual (though not complete) recovery after 60 days.
That's in mice [D]etailed studies will be required to establish that nanocontraception is not toxic for men. It is also more difficult to put a man under anesthesia for four hours and wrap an electric coil around his testicles than it is to do the same thing on a mouse. Instead, Sun hopes to be able to deliver the magnetic nanorods orally and find another way to direct them to the testicles. And it is uncertain how many men will be comfortable with shrunken testicles, even if they recover their original size with time.
Given that projected male contraceptives that have sounded a good less of a faff than this have still failed to obtain lift-off to any significant degree, I am really not holding my breath on this one.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3338271.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.
(And let's just not mention the very PiV-centric model going on here.)
But that wasn't actually the main that struck me about this: Heating Up Testicles With Nanoparticles Can Work as Male Contraception. Here's How.
Because I have a distant recollection of coming across Ye Urban Folklore in the Dayz of My Yoof about men warming up the relevant parts as a preliminary precautionary measure (mind you, there was also the thing about strapping the luminous-dialled watch to them for a dose of radiation for the same purpose). In Hunter Davies' 1965 novel, Here We Go, Round the Mulberry Bush, lads commend to one another taking a hot bath immediately before getting into a leg-over situation, and also the watch thing, with warnings not to leave it too long for fear of permanent infertility.
Plus, of course, with slightly more medical and scientific cred, men who wanted to beget offspring and were having difficulty due to lowish sperm count were told to cast off tight underpants that overheated the organs. Nanocontraception is based on the idea that nanoparticles - here, about 100 nanometres in diameter, or roughly one-thousandth the width of a piece of paper or of a strand of human hair - can somehow be delivered to the testicles, where they can be warmed. If you could warm up the testicles just a bit, you would have a way to turn sperm production on and off at will because the warmer they get, the less fertile they become. But it's a delicate process because the testicles can be irreversibly destroyed if they become too warm; the tissue dies and can no longer produce sperm, even when the testicles return to their normal temperature.
Experiments have been done on mice, and, I'm sorry, it sounds inordinately complicated and reminiscent of Michael Bentine's Newer Better Mouse-Trap: [M]agnetic nanoparticles were injected into mice's veins, and then the animals were anesthetized. A magnet was then placed next to their testicles for four hours, drawing the nanoparticles there. This procedure - injection followed by magnetic targeting - was performed daily for one to four days. After the last day of treatment, an electric coil was wrapped around the testicles, through which a current was passed. This induced a magnetic field that heated up the nanorods and, therefore, the testicles. Similar temperature increases - from a baseline of 29 C to between 37 and 42 C - were observed through this method. The more days a mouse had been injected with nanorods, the hotter its testicles became. Hotter testicles led to their atrophy and shrinkage, but they showed gradual recovery both 30 and 60 days after treatment as long as testicle temperatures didn't reach 45 C. Fertility was down seven days after treatment - in some cases, fertility was completely eliminated - but it also showed gradual (though not complete) recovery after 60 days.
That's in mice [D]etailed studies will be required to establish that nanocontraception is not toxic for men. It is also more difficult to put a man under anesthesia for four hours and wrap an electric coil around his testicles than it is to do the same thing on a mouse. Instead, Sun hopes to be able to deliver the magnetic nanorods orally and find another way to direct them to the testicles. And it is uncertain how many men will be comfortable with shrunken testicles, even if they recover their original size with time.
Given that projected male contraceptives that have sounded a good less of a faff than this have still failed to obtain lift-off to any significant degree, I am really not holding my breath on this one.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3338271.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.