German rival Bayer, which ended work on the subject. Organon likewise ended its interest, which Herjan Coelingh Bennink, global executive vice-president in the company's reproductive medicine program until 2000, believes is partly because this work lacked support in the company. Encouraged by the survey done by Anderson and his colleagues, Coelingh Bennink had pushed the approach, and helped design the joint trial. But – echoing Coutinho's account of his experience with gossypol – among Organon's most senior leaders attitudes were not as open as elsewhere.

"At board level it was only middle-aged white males," Coelingh Bennink recalls. "I tried to explain how important it could be, but they never got further than saying to each other, 'Would you do it?' 'No, I wouldn't do it.' It was not considerednot yet have emerged, but in the USA, two women are at least providing the enthusiasm.











"We're talking about drugs men are going to take for a really long time, so the pathway for approval is long too," says contraception researcher Diana Blithe. "So when scientists say, 'I have a product in mice that looks promising, we'll have a drug in five years,' it's very unrealistic." Nevertheless, she admits to being "really excited" about the approaches she's supporting.

Blithe is director of the male contraceptive development program at the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. She's responsible for one of the largest pots of male pill research money available today and believes a hormonal method is most likely to do the job.

She points