The Viagra Wars; Could a little blue pill be the savior of endangered animals? Conservationists are having none of it.

Byline: Craig Simons, With Melinda Liu in Beijing

Before getting his big idea, William von Hippel sat through an otherwise unexceptional lecture on traditional Chinese medicine in 1997. As China adopts Western habits--sedentary jobs, stressful urban lives, poor diets--its citizens are also picking up Western afflictions. Cases of impotence are on the rise, and so is the demand for traditional cures like seal penises, sea horses, geckos and other exotic ingredients that many Chinese believe confer virility. The problem: the growing demand for these ingredients is driving many species of wildlife to the brink of extinction. Von Hippel, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, was intrigued enough to visit apothecaries in Hong Kong and Beijing, where he saw a bewildering array of dried penises in all shapes and sizes. Then, in 1998, Viagra made its debut in the West.

Later that year, while von Hippel was hiking near Anchorage with his brother Frank, a biologist at the University of Alaska, the siblings decided to write a letter to the journal Science, proposing that this pill, at $10 a pop, could quell demand for "animal sexual potency products" and prove a boon not only for Chinese men but for endangered species. To their surprise, Science published the letter even though "we had no data," says William. When the brothers followed up with studies, they found a decline in the poaching of Canadian seals and Alaskan reindeer (killed for their antlers, a traditional Chinese cure) that they attributed partly to Viagra. If Viagra caught on among Asians, they argued, it could be an effective conservation solution.

You might think that the findings would be cause for celebration among wildlife conservationists, but it hasn't turned out that way. The brothers' work has in fact enraged many experts, who say it amounts to little more than an empty slogan for Pfizer, Viagra's manufacturer. Where the truth lies is hard to tell. Indeed, the debate over Viagra and endangered species is a case study of how hard it can be to disentangle science and the politics of drugs and environmentalism.

The stakes are high. According to the Chinese firm Shenzhen Matrix Information Consulting, the world market for traditional Chinese cures is more than $20 billion a year. On the mainland, traditional impotence treatments account for approximately $300 million annually. Last year Pfizer sold only 350,000 Viagra pills in China, but if Chinese men are anything like their Western counterparts, the potential is vast. About half of American men between the ages of 40 and 70 suffer from some degree of impotence, according to Pfizer. In 2003, Viagra brought in $1.8 billion for the company. Little wonder, then, that Pfizer donated $65,000 to the von Hippels for a January survey of 250 users of traditional medicine in Hong Kong. (Frank says they approached Pfizer, not the other way around, and the firm has been low-key and "completely nonintrusive.") Preliminary results show that most men who tried Viagra were more likely to stick with the pills than to return to their traditional medicines.

The Pfizer-backed study isn't the only evidence the von Hippels have. They've studied sales of hooded and harp-seal penises in Canada, and found a drop from about 40,000 in 1996 to 20,000 in 1998, the year Viagra hit Western markets. They've confirmed similar trends in the United States, where the market ...