Medical Firsts: Dr. Sherman Silber’s Ground-Breaking Fertility Innovations

Dr. Sherman Silber, director of the Infertility Center of St. Louis, delivers a rapid-fire review of his program’s major scientific “firsts.” He begins by stressing that the center, although privately run, functions as a true academic think tank. The achievements start in the late 1970s when Silber’s team introduced microsurgery to reproductive medicine, performing the world’s first vasectomy reversals and the earliest U.S. tubal-reversal operations under a microscope.

Next, he recalls pioneering in-vitro fertilization with surgically retrieved sperm for men who produce none in their ejaculate, followed quickly by mastering intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)—a demanding procedure that places a single sperm directly inside an egg. The list continues with the first successful human testicle transplant and the first ovary transplants; to this day, his clinic remains the only U.S. center offering ovary transplantation to cancer survivors and to girls born without functioning ovaries.

Silber shifts to cryobiology, noting that his laboratory introduced vitrification to the United States, turning egg and embryo freezing into a “virtually foolproof” technique. Looking forward, he outlines an active project that converts a patient’s skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells and then guides those cells toward becoming eggs—an approach already proven in mice and now “halfway there” in humans through international collaboration.

Throughout the video, Silber emphasizes two themes: relentless academic collaboration and intensely personal patient care. His closing message is that decades of ground-breaking work—spanning microsurgery, IVF, cryopreservation and regenerative biology—form the platform for tomorrow’s fertility solutions, all under one roof in St. Louis.