(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.
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