Man Who Made You Bulge with Happiness

Father of Viagra, Robert Furchgott, died last week. No one perhaps helped you so much to a better time in bed.

Have you heard the one about the man who got Viagra stuck in his throat? He got a stiff neck.  In 1998, those other stiff necks at the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology to pharmacologist Robert Furchgott, and his colleagues Louis Ignarro and Ferid Murid, for research that eventually led to a little blue pill that gave men the power to have sex. Furchgott died in Seattle on 19 May, at the age of 92, leaving behind a gratifying legacy of sex and drugs.

The cultural impact of Furchgott’s work has much resonance with his discovery of the impact of a gas widely known as a pollutant contributing to smog and acid rain. In 1978, during an experiment on another subject, a minor technician’s error changed the course of Furchgott’s research, and life. He stumbled upon an endothelium-derived relaxing factor, later identified as nitric oxide, and its ability to perform major biochemical functions in the body. Clearing the gas somewhat of its blemish, Furchgott proved its capability to enlarge blood vessels. On the grounds of this research, Pfizer in 1998 developed sildenafil citrate, or Viagra, an anti-impotency drug that has since become the fastest-selling pill in medical history.

Much like nitric oxide, sex itself—and much of the words connected with it—has strong associations with vulgarity. There’s something about this activity that requires two people to shed their clothes and contort themselves in awkward ways in order to thrill their senses that does not quite hold up to the rules of decency. But what shames us even more is an admission of our inability, or perhaps even unwillingness, to have sex. Our sexual vulnerabilities make us wilt under the hype of  sex as pure, undiluted pleasure, of which seemingly everyone (except you) seem to be getting a large share.

The beauty of Viagra is in the way it has subdued the intense shame of sexual ineptitude. It has got men to stand up and get counted among those with erectile dysfunction. In its first month alone, it was prescribed 500,000 times (not to count the number of pills sold without prescription). It has come as an antidote to confidence issues. And it has made the most ludicrous imagery seem possible: think senior citizens as well hung studs. For all purposes, it seems to have created a world of supermen, their briefs worn tightly outside their pants. Waiting for release!

What Viagra could not do is put an end to our dysfunctional sex lives. How many of our Viagra champions are actually pumping it up? Put another way, how many actually understand the complexities of  female sexual desire? It’s likely there are many anxious Viagra wives out there who were happier undisturbed.

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