“I wanted to make something free of all these problems,” Talwar told me. Yet the women’s husbands weren’t eager to use condoms and they themselves weren’t satisfied with the pills and IUDs available at the time, which sometimes interfered with normal menstruation and ovulation, and triggered headaches and mood swings. Talwar remembers those issues crystallizing sharply for him in the 1970s, he told me, when he encountered several groups of women in the holy city of Varanasi, who told him they were struggling to feed their large families. Solve that problem, and researchers will still be left with another: persuading people to take a fertility-hampering shot in an era of widespread vaccine hesitancy-while the specter of contraception’s problematic past still looms.įor many decades, the most stubborn barriers in contraception have been not about science, but about access and acceptance. Which runs counter to the prime directive of immune systems, evolved over countless millennia to distinguish the foreign from the familiar and to leave the body’s most vital tissues alone. Making a contraceptive vaccine effectively means “trying to immunize an animal against itself,” says Julie Levy, a feline-infectious-disease expert at the University of Florida who has worked on immunocontraceptives in animals. Talwar’s vaccine would do something different: It leaves the menstrual cycle unaltered, instead leveraging the powers of the immune system to keep unwanted pregnancies at bay.īut temporarily vaccinating against pregnancy is both brilliant in concept and devilishly difficult in execution, both scientifically and socially. ![]() ![]() Whether they’re packaged as pills, patches, implants, or shots, most common medical contraceptives work by flooding the body with hormones to put a pause on ovulation. If all goes well, it could become humanity’s first contraceptive vaccine-one that would prevent pregnancies in a way distinct from any birth control ever cleared for human use. Talwar’s invention is now in early-stage clinical trials. It would embody the sort of “set it and forget it” model that’s become a gold standard for health-and, in his words, be “accepted by the world over.” It would skip messy, sometimes dangerous side effects, such as weight gain, mood swings, and rare but risky blood clots and strokes. A nonagenarian who was once the director of India’s National Institute of Immunology, Talwar envisions bringing to market a new form of contraception that could block pregnancy without the usual trade-offs-an intervention that’s long-acting but reversible cheap, discreet, and easy to administer less invasive than an intrauterine device and more convenient than a daily pill. ![]() For half a century, Gursaran Pran Talwar has been developing what he hopes will be the next big thing in birth control.
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