Sperm: The Final Frontier

Besides their brain power, it's the university's investment in high-tech equipment that helps them compete. One of those high-tech machines is housed in a strip-mall cluster of university-owned buildings called the Life Sciences Research Lab at 15th Street and Wakarusa, a couple of miles west of the Lawrence campus. There, robotic equipment called high throughput screening lets scientists test as many as 100,000 chemical compounds in a day. Without it, testing prospective drugs could take years. At KU, it takes just weeks.

Ernst Schönbrunn, a KU professor of medicinal chemistry, is part of Tash's new team. An expert on cloning proteins, he can produce huge quantities of a single protein to test how it reacts to thousands of different chemicals. Schönbrunn can also use X-rays to see proteins in three dimensions to determine how each binds with a chemical compound.

When he got into this line of work, Schönbrunn admits, he never thought about a male birth-control pill. "If you're in drug discovery, you think more in terms of disease," he says. The search for a male contraceptive, he says, is "very, very challenging because you do not want to have any side effects, and it has to be reversible."

Despite Tash's success and the recent elevation of KU to a center for male-contraception research and drug development, the male pill is still years away.

Gamendazole hasn't gone into human trials yet. Schönbrunn estimates it could be 10 years before it, or a drug like it, hits the market.

Tash is cautious with his optimism. "The most difficult hurdle is toxicology testing, where most drugs fail," he says. But if such a drug survives the rigorous trials, he envisions a once-a-week pill. "It wouldn't be a night-before contraceptive," Tash says. "It would require that a person be willing to plan their life."

Schönbrunn is philosophical about the prospects. "Personally, I think it will be quite interesting to see if men in general are ready for the male contraceptive."

In the meantime, on Friday afternoons, Schönbrunn and the other Germans in his lab are the ones playing foosball at Harbor Lights in downtown Lawrence.

And that picture of a schnauzer up on the wall of the Ben Franklin LattéLand? That's Joe Tash's dog, Ruby. The quiet guy with his laptop? Try not to bother him too much. He's working.