Who is Dr. Sherman Silber? One of reproductive medicine’s most prolific innovators

For almost 50 years, Dr. Sherman Silber has developed and perfected most of the popular fertility treatments used around the world today.

• He performed the world’s first microsurgical vasectomy reversal, as well as the first testicle transplant, in the 1970s.
• Now, in the current century, he performed the world’s first ovary transplant.
• He has helped pioneer minimal ovarian stimulation to reduce IVF costsand eliminate complications while maintaining the very highest success rates, even in older women.
• Most recently, he has perfected the preservation of fertility for cancer patients with ovarian freezing and transplantation, and thereby figured out how to extend the reproductive biological clock of women.
• He was the first to develop the TESE, MESA and ICSI techniques for retrieving testicular and epididymal sperm in azoospermic men, and injecting them into eggs.
• He headed the clinical MIT team that first mapped and sequenced the Y chromosome in infertile men, and discovered the now-famous DAZ gene for male fertility.
• He was the first to bring to the United States from Japan the completely “game-changing” vitrification technique for reliable freezing of human eggs, embryos and ovary tissue.
• His research also includes the study of reproduction and treatment of infertility in zoo animals and endangered species.
• He has even recently answered the age-old question of why the dinosaurs went extinct by extending his research on male infertility and the Y chromosome, discovering that the change in Earth’s temperature 65,000,000 years ago led to the birth of a skewed male/female sex ratio.
• His most current research project is making sperm and eggs from skin biopsies.
• He currently has the only center in the world that can transplant ovary tissue reliably from fertile women to otherwise menopausal women (ovary allotransplantation) to restore or preserve their fertility.

Dr. Silber treats thousands of infertile couples every year who travel to St. Louis daily from all over the world. His patients come from every state in the United States and from all over Europe, South America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. His patients include doctors, teachers, rock stars, secretaries, politicians, astronauts, movie stars, scientists, truck drivers, lawyers, migrant fruit pickers, CEOs, princes and kings.

A world-renowned author on infertility and reproduction

Dr. Silber is the author of six medical textbooks, five best-selling books for the layman, and more than 250 peer reviewed scientific papers on human infertility and reproduction. His book, “How to Get Pregnant,” published by Little, Brown and Company, has been a major bestseller in the United States. Dr. Silber’s books have been published in five different languages, English, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.

He has appeared very frequently on television, including the TODAY Show, Donahue, Gary Collins, Peter Jennings ABC Nightly News, Oprah, Charlie Rose, Good Morning America and Ted Koppel Nightline. He has been a consultant numerous times on the Joan Rivers Show, ABC News, Good Morning America, and he has been a regular contributor on CNN, KMOX, WOR and NPR radio. Discovery Channel has aired several full-length documentaries and reality TV shows about his work.

Dr. Silber’s academic and professional career

Dr. Silber went to medical school at the University of Michigan, followed by post-graduate training at Stanford University and the University of Melbourne in Australia, and then again at the University of Michigan.

From 1967 to 1969, he provided medical care via the U. S. Public Health Service to Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts. Then, he taught at the University of Melbourne Medical School in Australia, and later at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco.

While Dr. Silber’s major clinical medical practice is at St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, he has also been a scientific collaborator at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Kato Clinic in Tokyo, and is an adjunct full professor at the University of Amsterdam, The University of Michigan and Sun Yat Sen University Medical School in China.

Dr. Silber always gives full credit for his well-known remarkable surgical skill to the Black janitor at the University of Michigan Research Lab, Jimmy Crudop, who was his most influential teacher during his early medical training.