On their Grand Challenges website, the Microsoft founder and wife Melinda are offering a $100,000 grant to an individual who designs “the next generation condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure” and promotes “regular use.”
As part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health initiatives, the foundation is offering a $100,000 grant to someone who is willing to design a “next generation condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use.”The foundation is committed to stopping the spread of AIDS and is concerned that condom use is not prevalent enough around the world.
According to the Gates write “Male condoms are cheap, easy to manufacture, easy to distribute, and available globally, including in resource-poor settings, through numerous well-developed distribution channels,”. But folks remain reluctant to use the items, complaining that prophylactics get in the way of pleasure and intimacy.
The idea is that, as reliable and easy-to-use as condoms are, men supposedly experience more pleasure having bareback sex than they do using a condom. A better feeling condom could go a long way to convincing some men that they might as well roll one on before sex, if only for their own safety. However, the question of how a condom feels during sex is not the only factor that has prevented the condom from better curbing STIs and the AIDS epidemic seen in some regions of the world. Religious beliefs in particular continue to hinder the distribution and adoption of condoms in the developing world – and those can’t simply be engineered away.
The start-up grant could lead to $1 million in further funding.
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