[crouton] Nathaniel Trost: The Birds, Bees, and the "I Love You" Virus of the Future

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Posted by Nathaniel Trost:
The Birds, Bees, and the "I Love You" Virus of the Future
http://crouton.powerblogs.com/archives/archive_2007_02_25-2007_03_03.shtml#1172729098


   I had an epiphany yesterday about the future culture war battlegrounds
   of teen sexuality. There has been a fair bit of controversy as of late
   brought about by issues like the FDA approval of [1]Gardasil and the
   drive in some states to add it to mandatory vaccination protocols for
   schoolchildren. Iâm pretty ambivalent on the issue, except to note
   that it looks like Merck has a very nice profit center on their hands.
   However, if people are getting worked up over this, I can think of a
   couple things on the horizon that will really make some heads explode,
   and not just from the usual suspects.
   Regardless of various ideological stances on the subjects of teen
   pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in young adults, everybody
   at least wants to avoid them. The means of doing so are the main bones
   of contention, and lost in the noise, the various camps all have some
   valid points. Teenagers are going to be, well, teenagers whether you
   expect them to be abstinent, use a condom, use a condom correctly, or
   take a pill consistently. However, broad-spectrum dosing of hormonal
   birth control on girls going through puberty is really not a good
   idea.
   For biological reasons, non-barrier contraception has been
   predominantly female targeted. There are ongoing trials of
   hormonal/drug based male contraceptives, but itâs much easier to try
   and stop one egg. Unless, of course, you could pretty much stop all
   the sperm, and a âmechanicalâ method [2]seems to be moving right along
   towards approval. If this evolves into a reversible, inexpensive,
   no-monkey-with-hormone-level way of rendering a male infertile, it may
   soon beg the question: why not make implantation mandatory for boys
   from puberty through adulthood (18, 21, whatever)? Somebody is going
   to propose it. Even if itâs too much of a political hot potato for the
   US, somewhere like the UK which has teenage pregnancy levels half the
   US, but still high enough to be a concern, who knows? If it were
   officially mandated somewhere, or merely became hip and trendy, it
   could quickly snowball into quite the ruckus.
   Of course, that does nothing for sexually transmitted diseases. But,
   at the moment bucketloads of money is being poured into the
   biosciences. Specifically of interest is money being spent as the
   result of the War on Terror in the area of detection of viral and
   bacterial agents. Granted, a lot of that money is going straight down
   a sewer drain of pork spending with little to show for it, but the
   field is advancing rapidly. Itâs not necessarily absurd to think that
   by 2015 or 2020 you could end up with something the size of Listerine
   Pocket-Pack film strips, only they donât freshen your breath, they let
   you check your prospective partner for a broad spectrum of contagious
   STDs. While the combination of those two things would certainly be
   enough to make James Dobsonâs head explode, itâs more than radical
   enough to cause controversy from a variety of directions and groups,
   not just the usual suspects.
   Going even further down the road, imagine the hip new fad for young
   lovers in 2040, expressing love by swapping customized sexually
   transmitted virii, like a variant of a defanged HPV. Sleep tight
   prospective parents of the future!

References

   1. http://www.gardasil.com/
   2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5412594.stm