In the middle of the last century, two remarkable women in their seventies drove the production of a contraceptive pill that revolutionised American society and underpinned the movement for women’s rights.
Now a young tech entrepreneur hopes to do something similar for men by offering what he bills as a cheap and reversible form of “male birth control”.
“Look inside here,” says Luke Fox, founder of Next Life Sciences, holding up a vial containing a treacly substance resembling pale golden syrup. “This is the hydrogel.”
It is designed to be injected into the vas deferens, the duct that carries sperm from the testicles during ejaculation. There it forms a filter that blocks anything bigger than one thousandth of a millimetre.
“It’s a quick, simple, ten-minute
