ONE PILL

Remote-Control Birth Control Is Coming

Funded by the Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation is funding the development of a smart capsule that could deliver drugs to a patient, but be altered or stopped by doctors through wireless signals. The big candidate for this type of medication delivery would be birth control. With this remote-control contraception, a woman might need to take one pill just every 16 years, but doctors could stop the course of hormones if she chooses to become pregnant. Testing on the contraception could begin as early as 2015 and hit the market by 2018. Still, the FDA has warned remote-control medicine could be vulnerable to hacking and security issues. Basically, it’s the broken condom of the future.