Doctor Sherman J. Silber: A Great Example of a Purposeful Life

 (This is an article assignment I had for an in-person interview earlier this year with the St. Louis Jewish Light. I took all photos in person during the lengthy interview.)

The official opening ceremony of the Silber Infertility Center on Clayton Road in Frontenac took place on Feb. 15. Just eight days later, infertility pioneer Dr. Sherman Silber revealed countless details of his miraculous life’s work.

He displayed a chart explaining a dramatic improvement in selecting the correct egg match for any specific patient. 

“It used to be very scary. Embryologists would have to look down at tanks, open them up, and liquid nitrogen fumes would come up. They would poke a little straw down there and try to see which label had which patient over it. ‘Oh, no! It’s this one! No, it’s that one!’’  Plus, liquid nitrogen had to be refilled about every two days to make sure it never melted down.” 

Also, when you opened the large incubator, the atmospheric culture system would change as would everyone’s petri dish within the incubator.

Enter the Tomorrow Machine which Silber’s team invented in Belgium. You simply enter a patient’s name and birthday, and a drawer automatically opens with liquid nitrogen and the embryo you want to transfer.

“It’s so safe and flawless! Now it’s just one little micro incubator for every single patient. It’s 22nd century equipment amazing embryologists around the world. They tell me (from photos), ‘These are the best eggs we’ve seen in any IVF center.’ It’s nice to hear that because it correlates with our results. At any age you view, our baby rate for eggs is four to five times higher. Instead of a fertilization rate of 72%, it’s over 90%.”

Soon as the new center opened, his team executed its first egg retrievals there on Jan. 27. Previously, all work was done at his St. Luke’s Hospital office.

Silber’s IVF lab began in 1985. His first In Vitro Fertilization was done at St. Luke’s. Other infertility doctors couldn’t do IVF because they had no understanding of cell culture which he learned in 1973 in Melbourne, Australia.

“All the infertility doctors, including me were very hesitant getting into IVF.  We were hoping it wouldn’t work because it was just a new venture. Sometimes when you don’t want to do something that’s not in your comfort zone, G-d gives you a little nudge. Then you do something you wouldn’t have done otherwise! I realized it wasn’t enough to just treat people conventionally. We really needed IVF.”

On Feb. 23, just two days before this interview, Silber was on Facebook Live with 35-year-old Meaghan Ferneau. Just 35 years previously, Meaghan’s mother was infertile.  Silber’s crew got her pregnant with IVF. That led to her perfectly normal, healthy girl. But Meaghan was also infertile and had been trying to have a baby for seven years.  She had endometriosis, then had several laparoscopic surgeries and multiple rounds of various drugs which did not help.  Meaghan’s doctor informed her she needed to seek reproductive help. Her visits were totally unsatisfying. 

“So, her mother referred her to us, and Meaghan called me the very next day. They were living in Arkansas then, and now in St. Louis. Now, she has a nine-month-old baby girl who is the second generation of babies.” 

‘We love her so much that it would be great to have another!’ Meaghan said on the video holding her baby girl.

More new age results were invented using AI for choosing sperm to inject into an egg. That was a gigantic step for male infertility. Silber noted they don’t care about the sperm count, needing just a few. They’re also not interested in the diagnosis of male infertility because when doing IVF, they just pick the sperm and inject it into the egg.

“As humans, we can find the best sperm, but they move so fast. It’s tricky and you may not get it right. AI chooses the best sperm. It circles it, then when it swims off, it circles another one and you only pick up the sperm with a circle around it. So, we know we’re only getting the best sperm.” 

Meanwhile, Silber’s own life’s journey began strangely. He was born on the south side of Chicago as the neighborhood’s only Jewish kid to parents who were not meant for parenting. Prior to his grade school years, he was dropped off at a Jewish Family Service office that was akin to a wonderful orphanage.

Once he entered school, Silber rode from there to a conservative shul/Hebrew School. He was there until around eight at night. That experience was also uplifting with nurturing people.

A positive from both his parents since age five was the push to be a doctor as a great way to permanently escape his own poor, fight-filled neighborhood.

Silber always wanted to be a creative writer. He’s written 11 books translated into five different languages. But they’re all medical.

He split undergraduate time at the University of Michigan between medicine and the humanities. Later, there was only time for medical studies.

Silber planned on a residency in cardiovascular surgery at Stanford where he did his internship. But during the Vietnam War, he was called up to the Public Health Service and was sent to Alaska. There were no urologists there, so he constantly called to Seattle for help.  After Alaska, he returned to Michigan.

“After I was in urology a little bit, it wasn’t as interesting as when I started. But one thing I really liked was kidney transplantation. I developed all the microsurgery for doing them in rats. My wife’s mother and friends all said, ‘What are you doing? Rats don’t have insurance.  They’re not going to pay you.’” 

It was merely an interest, but it transformed surgical research which used to be done on dogs who would howl endlessly.

Silber met his wife Joan in his senior year of medical school. After years of training together all over the world, they returned to the U.S. After marriage, they settled in Joan’s hometown of St. Louis and Sherman was immediately ‘adopted’ by her parents.

Joan inspired Sherman to do his first vasectomy reversal in 1975 that led to a front- page New York Times article by famous medical writer Jan Brody.

Fast forward to 2004. Silber’s team was the first to perform a successful ovary allotransplant using eggs of a fertile woman transplanted into one with no eggs.

“That was an interesting story.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page criticized me. They kept saying I was a cowboy.  But a year later, she was pregnant, and the front page read, ‘Revolutionary Fertility Doctor Achieves Success with Ovary Transplant.’” 

His team has successfully done four, utilizing a safe immunosuppression protocol that can be done on life-saving procedures.

One example was a young, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish girl with Turner’s Syndrome who couldn’t have babies. They did the transplant from her sister. She started ovulating and they found a great match for her.  She never thought that would happen, but has been pregnant since late summer!

What was Silber’s attitude toward thinking all the details of his work could be possible? He said it’s all based on curiosity that’s developed in the first three years of life.

“I learned curiosity from how I was taken care of at the Jewish orphanage. It’s the secret to all innovation and progress.”

Regarding the Y chromosome, most thought hormonal issues caused a man to have little or no sperm count. That led to a variety of treatments. But Silber’s control trials showed that none of those treatments worked.  So, it had to be genetic.

Silber said that from an educational point of view, people used to talk about how the world was overpopulated.  He said that’s been debunked by population sociologists and that young people need to support an aging population even if it’s pretty healthy.  Despite being age 82, Silber still swims a mile every other day. He added that it’s crucial that we allow these people to have babies because if you ask any patient what they care about most in life, it’s their children and grandchildren. 

Curiosity keeps Silber up at night.  He always has a scratch pad to write problems of patients or systems to take care of the next day.

“Mozart always had melodies going through his head and he could hardly sleep because he had to write them down. That’s how I am with problems and new ideas.”

Another recent miraculous result involved an Asian billionaire and his 36-year-old wife.  They had been to six different IVF centers with no success.  He had an incredibly low sperm count, was told he had a Y chromosome deletion, and would need donor sperm. But he did a massive Internet search, found Silber’s work on the Y chromosome, hopped on a plane and flew here.

“I said that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard because with that kind of Y chromosome deletion, you have SOME sperm! That’s all we need because we pick it up by the tail under the microscope and inject it into the egg. He said, ‘But you haven’t even looked at my semen.’ I told him, ‘We’ll look at your semen, but I guarantee that you’ll have some sperm.’ He brought his wife here. We did an ultrasound and found she had a very small number of eggs. So, I said, ‘We’ll have to do mini-IVF because we’ll have a much higher baby rate for eggs, and we’re going to use your sperm.’ He didn’t believe it was possible, but they had healthy twins!”

Still working some 70 hours a week, Silber is currently collaborating with colleagues in Osaka, Japan and at UCLA’s stem cell center. They’re doing skin biopsies on men with zero sperm and women over age 50 with no eggs. They’re taking skin cells, fibro blasting them into stem cells, then turning those into completely normal eggs. They are being funded by that same billionaire with the fertility success story!

Silber’s new IVF center offers a patient-friendly experience in an ultra-modern lab.  While he is the big name because of his innovations, he insists far more credit should go to his coordination staff of 20-25 years and his seasoned embryologists.

Dozens of awards have poured into Silber’s hands over the years. Regarding one that stands out most, he grabbed a plaque from 2010.

“Four months before the Arab spring, things were looking good in Syria. Assad was trying to move more toward the West. That would have been very important because he would have been a counterfoil toward Iran. I was on Al Jazeera as a real hero, and I gave a speech after being named the only Jewish member of the Middle East Infertility Center in Damascus.

“It was so joyful as the only Jew there with so many Iranians, Palestinians, and other Arabs.  There we were, my wife and I. My speech was broadcast all over the Arab world. What I said was, ‘This is amazing!  Here I am, Jewish, you’re inviting me as a lifetime member, I’ve got a son and grandchildren who live in Israel, and it’s here in Damascus that I’m talking right now. Syria has always been a center of communication and trade for the world. It always brought diverse people together.  It’s appropriate that I’m the first Jew to come here to be honored by you. I hope this is a symbol that we’re all going to live together in a diverse society, in the Middle East, and Israel, Syria and Jordan will all be happy together.’ “

Silber added that everyone rushed in with their little cameras to pose with he and Joan who have been married for 57 years after a one-year engagement.

Having enjoyed countless TV appearances, Silber’s most recent one was with Megyn Kelly on The Today Show. He brought a patient who was 17 when he first froze her ovary.  She required two bone marrow transplants to survive Hodgkin’s disease, and then chemotherapy.  They transplanted the frozen ovary back to her and she ended up having four babies. She’s now 40 years old and an oncology nurse at Children’s Hospital.

Regarding Silber’s own family, Joan’s on the national board of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).  She was chairman of the Boys and Girls Club of St. Louis, and Aish HaTorah for about 10 years.

Eldest son David is an Orthodox rabbi in Israel with eight children and three grandchildren.  He is also a prominent Mergers and Acquisition lawyer. Two of the three lawyers representing Israel at The Hague are from his firm, Horowitz and Company, the oldest in Israel, dating back to 1908.

Middle son Steve was a U.S. Marine anti-terrorist who became an outdoors wilderness guide. He nearly made the Olympics in snow skiing.  His present goal is a Master’s Degree to practice psychology.

Youngest son Joe is Chief Engineer at Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory in northern California with a major interest in dark energy. He directs his staff to build machinery, and he’s also written four novels.

Long ago a chess master in high school in Chicago, winning the Illinois state title, Silber still loves making videos of wildlife in Africa and Alaska. Recreational loves are fly fishing and snow skiing. He said that if he had a tag line, it would be ‘Keep Your Nuclei Rotating’ 

“We have stem cells for everything in our body, and there are resting follicles in the ovary. It’s well-known by some bio engineers that myogenic tension, or tissue pressure, causes the nuclei of the stem cells to rotate. When they do, they slow down their metabolism and last longer. It’s from the pressure that’s caused by any form of exercise.

Regarding life itself, the good doctor added, “When you’re young, everything can be fun. As you get older, you think more about your mortality and what’s really important. The most important thing is to be happy when you die. That happens if you feel you’ve had a purpose in life and have done something useful. If you don’t have a purpose or purposes, you can get depressed and die unhappy. So, it’s really important to have a purpose.”

Regarding life’s purposes, on which he has excelled, Silber concluded by citing “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. 

Parkway Central junior Andrew Rubin is living his dream with State Street Spices

 (Here is my more in-depth and detailed version of a story I recently had published in West Newsmagazine. All photos were sent to me, courtesy of Andrew Rubin.)

According to 18^th century British poet William Cowper, “Variety’s the very spice of life that gives it all its flavour.”

That’s precisely what Andrew Rubin has experienced this school year. The Parkway Central junior has enjoyed an all-encompassing journey involving travel, some of the highest levels of school classes and true entrepreneurship.

But that old poem is even more fitting considering that on September 6, 2023, Rubin started his own business known as State Street Spices. It now boasts bottles of spice covering eight different flavors, each named after cities where he’s traveled thus far except for one.

Rubin would be considered an inspiration to many even without his business prowess. After all, that success followed closely on the heels of a wide variety of physical ailments throughout his young life.

“When I was younger, I had a bunch of stomach issues which I still have,” Rubin said. “I’ve had eye problems my whole life, too. When I was in (Shenandoah Valley) elementary school, I had to wear a patch over one eye for a few years because the vision was so little compared to the other eye.  I almost went blind in fifth grade and had to have a procedure to save my vision. I was about 11 years old then, the youngest in St. Louis to have that operation. I also had really bad headaches from it (a corneal disease known as keratoconus that former baseball Cardinal Tommy Pham had). That led me to being in the hospital; mostly in St. Louis Children’s downtown. I was also in a wheelchair for a couple years in middle school.”

 

Despite all those ailments, Rubin has persisted in so many ways, taking all the difficult steps leading up to his business venture.

The lifelong Chesterfield resident is not only involved in speech and debate, but belongs to three different Honor societies.  He spent the first two years of high school on Central’s Student Council. At the end of his sophomore year, Rubin won the Hugh O’Brian Leadership Award.  This year, he is the school’s president of DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America), a high school and college program for students interested in business and future entrepreneurship.

Through his schooling, Rubin acknowledged a few outstanding mentors who have helped on his business journey. One is Erin Fluchel, the Spark director who works with about 30 students in the Spark incubator program to help students grow their businesses. He also mentioned Parkway Central business teachers Sarah Hale and Julie Weindel through DECA and National Business Honor Society who Rubin deems ‘equally amazing and influential.’

“I grew up watching every episode of Shark Tank as often as possible because I love watching it, and I actually just saw it at dinner about an hour ago,” Rubin said of this May 19 interview. “A couple years ago, I participated in a summer program at SLU that was an entrepreneurship program and from there I knew I wanted to start my own business.

“I first started to think of State Street Spices around March of last year. But I didn’t start it then because you sometimes push back before starting a business because you think of all the risks involved. But when I started my junior year, I joined the Spark Incubator Program which is offered through Parkway and Rockwood. It gives you half the day on Wednesdays and Fridays to work on your business, grow your networking and work with a group of people who are also starting a new business.  That’s been a neat experience this year and I’ll also be joining it next school year. It’s been an amazing program not only to start my business, but also to learn all these important skills in the business world.”

His parents, Sarah and Phillip offered the initial few hundred dollars to get things started. From there, Andrew combined his loves of travel, cooking for his family nearly every night, and entrepreneurship.

Rubin’s been on several float trips, but that was nothing compared to many of the places he’s been over the past year or so. Included in that was the first time he had ever left the country with a mid-March trip to Calgary, Alberta Canada that included actual hiking at Banff National Park.

Regarding that trip, Jennifer Rubin Evans declared in a Facebook post, “So proud of my baby brother! As most of you know, he was literally in a wheelchair a few short years ago and we never knew if he was going to walk again. Now, he just crushed two difficult hikes on the side of a mountain in ice, snow, and mud.”

Rubin has also flown three times to Washington, DC, his favorite city.  While there, he not only toured a pair of universities, but also visited a good deal of the historical landmarks and a variety of cultural and fun tourist sites of our Nation’s Capital.

But it was his 2023 trip to Madison, WI where Rubin came up with his State Street Spices idea and the company name because he was riding down State Street at the time.

“My thought was that I wished I could try the famous foods of different cities in the comfort of my own home, without having to pay to travel. So, I thought of the idea of a spice blend company with the focus on the authenticity of each spice.  There are a lot of spices right now such as our Nashville Hot, but other major spice companies don’t necessarily focus on the quality and authenticity of what they put out with a lot of additives (such as salt) and cheap fillers.  I wanted to start a company that focuses on authenticity.  Each of our eight spice blends took roughly 40-80 hours of research for which I have a research formula. I also looked into a bunch of recipes and restaurants in each city to really narrow down the most authentic cases for each of the blends. My research looks deep into the cities to see what the other spice markets have lacked.”

Rubin added that the idea is to bring authentic flavors from throughout cities and states in this country. So, it was fitting being on a street named State Street to use that name. The only city of his eight spices he hasn’t visited is Buffalo, NY.

Since Rubin has spent so much time in hospitals, some 10% of the funds from his sales automatically go directly to buying games for the staying time of youths at local children’s hospitals. He added that playing games would have been a great distraction for him in helping take the constant focus off the gloom of being in a hospital and on the medical issues he had.

In addition to the initial funding of his business, Rubin credits his parents for their support of helping mix spices and in being beside him in the handful of events he has attended to support his business. That began with the Parkway West craft fair late last October.

A couple weeks later, Andrew’s mom added a Facebook post congratulating him on the business and noting that his then seven spices can also be added to meat, chicken, vegetables and even popcorn!!!

“Since then, I’ve invested everything and put in my own money to really grow this business,” Rubin said.  “Before I got into this, last summer I was working about 60 hours a week through two different jobs in the daycare industry. I really worked hard because I knew I wanted to start a business and they can cost a lot of money. I’ve reinvested everything I’ve made to grow my business.”

Another financial highlight along the way was winning a $500 Parkway-Spark! And Waterway Car Wash business grant.

“I’ve done five different events and I’ve sold about 500 spice jars just at those events.  On average, I sell a spice jar about every four minutes which is super neat.  I also offer samples of items like dips in which you can add the spices.  It’s been a really good experience going to those events.  However, about two months ago, I also started my online store.  So, I’ve been excited about getting some online orders to grow that part of the business. For four different weeks in the summer, I will be at West County Mall to sell some of my spices at a kiosk. I’m really excited about that being another opportunity to help grow my business. But my goal in the next few months is to get into a grocery store.  Getting into retail is a really big dream of mine. So, I would not only be going to all these events, but also have my spices in these shops.”

The State Street Spice details for the West County Mall appearance will be on the lower level near Nordstrom from June 10-16, June 24-30, July 15-21, and July 29-Aug. 4.  Prior to that, Rubin will have a June 1-2 booth at the Kimmswick Strawberry Festival.

Rubin is also thankful for some extra special free publicity he has received as of late. He reached out to St. Louis Bucket List through its Instagram page.  They featured a story on Rubin and also helped him create some helpful videos which he is set to post on his business page www.statestreetspices.com in the coming weeks.

He also sent a letter to KSDK’s Rene Knott about his business. Knott really liked the letter and responded to Rubin by email. They stayed in contact, Knott filmed an interview in which they mixed up some spices, and on May 15, Rubin was featured on the ‘My Lou’ segment.

“I’ve also actually gotten some interest from some pretty large companies both from the St. Louis area and Nashville companies,” Rubin added. “But I just want to focus on distribution and some of the other challenges of starting a business.  Being able to grow my business but not grow it too quickly has been something I’ve had challenges with. So, I’m willing to find a good balance for that. But this has all been a great experience starting my own business, to see it grow, and I’m very excited about this summer at West County Mall…not just to sell my spices, but to grow my brand and get it more out there.”

Rubin noted that, in the meanwhile, he’s looking to add one or two more spices in the coming months to add to the most recent one, L.A. Taco. The others are in alphabetical order: Buffalo Buffalo, Cincinnati Chili, Kansas City Barbecue, Memphis Barbecue, Nashville Hot, New York Steak and St. Louis Barbecue.

“There are so many cities with lots of different flavors to focus on. So, I’m looking to add more flavors, then later down the line, I would love to add some other things like dips and sauces. But that comes with a lot more legal corridors because they would be more perishable items.  So, that would be more years down the line.  Right now, I’m just focusing on adding more spice blends and continue to grow that segment of the business.”