Who produced the first oral contraceptive?
First ORAL CONTRACEPTIVE.
The first ORAL CONTRACEPTIVE was produced by Dr. Gregory Pincus of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology at Shrewsbury, Mass. In 1950 he was invited to undertake research on behalf of the Planned Parenthood Movement to devise an ideal contraceptive, defined as ‘harmless, entirely reliable, simple, practical, universally applicable and aesthetically satisfactory to both husband and wife’. Pincus and co-worker Dr John Rock spent five years in developing an oral contraceptive to meet these requirements from the compounds progestin and oestrogen. The first clinical tests were made in 1954.
The first large-scale oral contraceptive tests with Dr. Pincus’s pill were initiated in 1956 at San Juan, Puerto Rico, where 1,308 women involved in a slum-clearance scheme volunteered to participate. Of this number 811 were put on Conovid and 497 on Uvulen. At the end of the three-year trial, out of the 830 women remaining in the test group, only 17 had become pregnant.
The first commercially produced oral contraceptive was Enovid 10, marketed by the G.D. Searle Drug Co. of Skokie, Ill, on 18 August 1960.
In Britain, the first field test was carried out with the cooperation of 50 Birmingham women by Searle Laboratories in 1960. The first commercially available oral contraceptive in Britain was Conovid 5 mg, launched on 1 January 1961.
