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The Egg Man

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Silber acknowledges that a woman implanted with ovarian tissue could theoretically begin ovulating again at the age of 70 or older. Just last year a woman in Spain became the world's oldest mother when, at 67, she gave birth to twins conceived through in vitro fertilization. "I think most people would say 55 should be the cutoff," says Silber. "And even that is an extreme example. Most people will want kids sooner."

Women who deliver babies late in life have an increased chance of developing diabetes and hypertension. But Silber believes babies born from the frozen eggs should suffer no inherent heath problems due to freezing. Mothers have used frozen embryos and frozen sperm to produce children for more than twenty years with no ill effects, says Silber. He believes frozen eggs will be no different.

As for ethical concerns, Silber says they're a non-issue because the procedures remain patient-driven. "There is no ethical problem provided there's an internal review board — which we have — and the patient's consent," he says. "What am I supposed to do, deny the patients' wishes?"

Today is not the first time Dr. Sherman Silber has upstaged the medical community. For that, you'd need to travel back to San Francisco, 1975. The American College of Surgeons is in town for its annual conference, and Silber, then a 33-year-old urology professor at University of California at San Francisco, is about to lay claim to the world's first-ever vasectomy reversal.

Most researchers might debut such an achievement in the pages of a medical journal. Not Silber. He's going to unveil the complicated procedure live via closed-circuit television in front of all 20,000 doctors gathered at the conference. The cameras are rolling when Silber looks down to see his usually steady hands trembling like a candy-jacked kid about to play Operation.

"My hands never shake!" proclaims Silber. "But now they won't stop, and the microscopic lens of the camera makes it look even worse."

So what does Silber do? He acknowledges his quivering fingers to the audience and then performs the incalculably difficult task of sewing up the damaged vas deferens — a sperm duct as tiny as the period at the end of this sentence.

The next day, October 15, 1975, the New York Times splashes Silber's name across the front page in an article headlined, "Vasectomy Now Reversible with Microsurgery." All of a sudden hundreds of men are calling to ask — beg, even — that Silber make them fertile once more. "We're so overwhelmed the head of my department tells me, 'Look, you're going to have to stop what you're doing and open an infertility clinic.'"

Silber leaves California for his wife Joan's hometown of St. Louis, where he can better accommodate the patients flying in from all over the country to see him. He calls his clinic at St. Luke's Hospital the "Infertility Center of St. Louis." In 1978 identical twin brothers knock on his door. One of the twins is virile, the proud father of three healthy children. His twin was born without testicles. So Silber takes one of the brother's gonads and transplants it into his twin. It's the world's first-ever testicle transplant, and again Silber garners headlines. The former eunuch goes on to father three kids of his own.

Next, Silber performs the first tubal-ligation surgery in the United States — that is, the procedure that restores fertility to female patients who'd willingly had their "tubes tied" to avoid pregnancy. Later he pioneers a technique for retrieving sperm from impossibly sterile men. He writes a best-selling book (400,000 copies sold to date) called How to Get Pregnant and becomes a regular on the daytime talk show circuit: Oprah, Good Morning America, The Today Show. Phil Donahue invites him on his show a record eight times.

The little Jewish kid from south Chicago is every bit as successful as his parents dreamed. Though was there ever any doubt? All his life his immigrant folks — his father from Poland, his mother from Lithuania — prodded him to study and become a doctor. Even when he attended University of Michigan on an academic scholarship and flirted with the idea of getting an advanced degree in English, it was his parents who called him back to medicine. They themselves hardly had grade-school educations, but this they knew: Doctors don't live in the slums of south Chicago, English professors do. "Education is the only way out of the ghetto. My parents never quit reminding me of that," he says.

So he attends medical school. The Vietnam War breaks out and Silber gets a job working for the U.S. Public Health Service. They send him to Alaska. It's like the TV show Northern Exposure, a big-city Jewish doctor in the wilds of the Yukon. Silber loves every minute of it. He gets to perform procedures no medical student back in Michigan would ever have a crack at. When he has no clue what he's doing, he calls down to the Health Service headquarters in Seattle and someone gives him surgical instructions over the phone.

One day an Eskimo named Arctic Joe wanders in from the tundra. "Arctic Joe is rumored to be the greatest wolf hunter who ever lived," remembers Silber. "But at the age of 84 he's having to stop the hunt every hour to take a leak." Silber diagnoses an enlarged prostrate. He calls down to Seattle for advice and, by phone, they explain how to remove the gland. Silber performs the surgery and Arctic Joe is so happy and relieved he gives the young doctor a wolf-skin pelt as a token of gratitude. "I still have the pelt. It's beautiful," says Silber.

After two years in Alaska, Silber returns to Michigan and focuses his studies on urology. He plans on becoming an expert in kidney transplants. He gets a job as a researcher at Australia's University of Melbourne and spends the next 24 months transplanting kidneys in rats. Operating on the tiny rodents requires a steady hand, and soon Silber is skilled in the delicate craft of microsurgery. One night he's going to bed when he comments to his wife Joan: "You know, based on what I'm doing with rats I bet I could perform a vasectomy reversal on men. But there probably won't be much demand for it."

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