But some of the book’s messages surprised me. Many of the lessons of How to Have Sex in an Epidemic are familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a decent sex-ed class. Today, the idea that gay men should wear condoms to protect themselves from HIV is a given-although the advent of Truvada, a daily pill that can protect people who take it from HIV infection, may change that. As Ron Frezieres, a Gates grantee who has designed and executed clinical contraceptive trials for more than 30 years, says, “Even if a condom had twice the breakage rate … but everybody loves it, it enhances sex-maybe that’s really incredible, to get 100 percent product utilization of a product that breaks 2 percent a 50 percent utilization of a condom that breaks 1 percent.”
From a public health perspective, condom effectiveness is a numbers game. As a program director for the Gates Foundation wrote in a blog post about the condom grants, “It may seem obvious, but the success and impact of any public health tool hinges on that tool being used consistently and correctly by those who need it.” This is as true in America as it is in sub-Saharan Africa-in spite of the availability of birth control and treatments for STIs, America has the highest rates of unintended pregnancies and HIV transmission in the developed world. It’s this connection that inspired the Gates Foundation to get involved. Meanwhile, in 2014 a California inventor raised more than $100,000 on the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo to develop the Galactic Cap, a condom designed to fit snugly on the head of the penis while leaving the shaft bare. In November 2013, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began distributing $100,000 grants to teams of researchers who’d submitted proposals for “ the Next Generation of Condom.” The Gates Foundation hopes that at least one of the grantees will develop a product that men in the developing world want to use, which will consequently have “substantial benefits for global health, both in terms of reducing the incidence of unplanned pregnancies and in prevention of infection with HIV or other STIs.” The winning proposals include Resnic’s a condom made of graphene, which is a form of carbon that’s a single atom thick a condom incorporating plant-based antioxidants and an “ultra-sheer wrapping condom” made of polyethylene, a type of plastic often used in packaging. Resnic is not the only one who has been trying to build a better condom.
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