Gwendolyn Brady, a teacher in Corning, Ark., received a probable multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2005. That year, her sister Felicity Brady Ray was diagnosed with breast cancer. 

Prior to chemotherapy, Ray, then 28, wanted to look into preserving her fertility. 

“She said, ‘I’m not married. My life hasn’t even really started yet. I haven’t even thought about trying to have kids,’ ” Brady recalls. 

So, Ray had her ovarian tissue frozen by an infertility specialist in St. Louis. Following successful cancer treatment, she had the tissue transferred back. 

“Now she has a little boy who just turned 8,” Brady says. 

Nearly a decade later, Brady received an official diagnosis of relapsing-remitting MS. She knew that treatment for the autoimmune disease would be challenging on her body, including possibly compromising her fertility, and she had already lost her right ovary from a medical emergency in college. 

“I just wasn’t taking any chances,” says Brady, then 37. 

Remembering her sister’s success preserving her ovarian tissue, she froze hers as well before undergoing a hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), an intense chemotherapy treatment for multiple sclerosis,  the goal of which is to reset the immune system.

Just a few months ago, now at the age of 46, she had the tissue transferred back by the same physician, Dr. Sherman J. Silber, a St. Luke’s infertility specialist known for his pioneering work in in vitro fertilization (IVF) and fertility preservation. 

From English to infertility  

Silber has helped a great many patients from diverse backgrounds dealing with health issues relating to infertility, but it’s been a long and arduous journey getting there. 

Growing up, he dreamt of going to schools such as Yale, Harvard or Princeton. 

“But I was from a terrible neighborhood and very, very poor,” he says of his youth in Chicago. 

Fortunately, he received a scholarship to study at the University of Michigan, where he informed his college counselor that he wanted to be a doctor. However, his counselor stressed that Silber only take the prerequisites for medical school and everything else in humanities. 

“He told me I wouldn’t have the chance to do that again,” Silber said. “So, I was actually an English major.” 

Silber won several literary awards at Michigan, including an award that Arthur Miller won in 1936 known as the Hopwood Award.

“I wrote short stories and poetry, and I was so fascinated with the possibility of actually being an English professor,” he said. “But I also knew I wanted to be a doctor.” 

During his senior year at the University of Michigan Medical School, an elective allowed him to also be a teaching fellow in the English department. That’s when Silber met his wife, Joan. 

“She grew up in St. Louis, and that’s what eventually brought me here,” he said. 

But before he would settle in Missouri, Silber spent years doing additional training at Stanford University and the University of California-San Francisco, among other schools. 

With the initial goal of becoming a heart surgeon, Silber was later assigned to urology during his time in Anchorage, Alaska. working for a public health service program helping patients with surgical and medical diseases of the urinary system and reproductive organs.

“I really liked it, and it turns out I was a good surgeon,” he said. “So I went into urology.”

A pioneering doctor 

During his time in Alaska, Silber also worked in gynecology, which increased his interest in treatments for infertility. In addition, he had worked on kidney and heart transplants in rats and mice to study immunosuppression, a challenging process that involves surgical skill with tiny vessels. 

“With this microsurgery, I can put together the tiniest little vessels,” he said. “These vessels are so tiny that I thought, ‘I bet I could even reverse a vasectomy,’ which at the time nobody could do.” 

And he did. 

After performing a televised demonstration of the surgery for a vasectomy reversal, he was featured in a New York Times article written by Jane Brody in October 1975. 

“I was on the front page of the New York Times, and I was really young,” said Silber, who was in his early 30s at the time. 

Today, he’s considered a pioneer in microsurgery and infertility, along with one of the world’s leading authorities in the field of infertility, including expertise in IVF, Mini IVF, sperm retrieval, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), male infertility, vasectomy reversal, tubal ligation reversal, and egg and embryo freezing. 

Silber has also discovered how to preserve ovarian tissue and transplant it back later; this is especially helpful for women undergoing cancer treatment who want to preserve their fertility. 

“We would take out one ovary and freeze it, and then we would plan on transplanting it back to a patient 10 or 20 years later or when she was ready to have a child,” he said. “So then 10 years later, we started transplanting them back, and now we’ve completed over 50 ovary transplants.”

One of Silber’s most recent successes includes transplanting back Gwendolyn Brady’s ovarian tissue. 

Judaism and reproductive technology 

Today, Silber is in his early 80s, and Judaism continues to have a profound impact on his life and career. 

“The Jewish thinking is the thinking of life and creating life and making the world a better place, doing tikkun olam,” he said, part of the reason he went into infertility. 

Over the past few years, Silber’s team has transplanted ovarian tissue between different women, a procedure known as an allogeneic transplant, which has been particularly helpful for Orthodox Jewish women with Turner syndrome. This is a genetic condition in females in which one X chromosome is missing or altered, which can lead to short stature, heart and kidney problems and infertility. 

Orthodox Jewish women with infertility issues may never find a match or be able to get married,  Silber said. While Orthodox Judaism does not allow for donor eggs to be used, it does allow ovarian transplants. 

“Then, according to the Talmud, it legitimately becomes their ovary, and they can get married and have all the kids they want,” said Silber, some of whose Orthodox patients have come from New York and even Israel for treatment. 

Though his wife grew up attending Temple Israel, the couple does not affiliate with a specific shul. But Silber has a big family, including three sons: one who is an Orthodox rabbi and lawyer in Jerusalem; one who is an artist and psychologist who guides wilderness trips in Alaska; and the third who is a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Lab at the University of California-Berkeley, studying dark energy and cosmic background radiation. He also has eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

In the future

Right now, Silber is working with Japanese colleagues in Osaka to study skin cells in mice, turn them into stem cells, and potentially turn those stem cells into eggs and sperm. 

“We can take those stem cells and develop them into eggs and into sperm in the mice,” Silber said. “Then we put them together, and we get healthy baby mice.” 

The process in humans will be much slower, Silber said, but studies have begun in which researchers take women’s skin cells, turn them into stem cells, and then convert them into the initial precursors of sperm and eggs that emerge during early embryonic development, otherwise known as primordial germ cells. 

“That’s half the way to becoming eggs and half the way to becoming sperm,” he said. “So, in 10 years, if we can’t get eggs out of a woman and she doesn’t want donor eggs and has nothing left, we would be able to generate eggs from her own DNA just by skin biopsy.” 

As for now, Silber’s success among patients continues to spread throughout the world. Over the years, his work has been featured in numerous journals, books and media outlets, ranging from local publications to the “Today Show,” the Discovery Health channel and NBC News, among others. 

For Gwendolyn Brady, she hopes to restore her endocrine function thanks to Silber. During the time without her ovarian tissue, Brady went into early menopause and is now dealing with osteoporosis and other related concerns. 

“At this point, she won’t have to be on hormone replacement therapy, because she’ll have natural hormone production from her ovary,” Silber said.

Brady, who spent the last decade recovering from multiple sclerosis and returning to a healthy life, hopes to continue restoring her health since her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, including her fertility. 

As for starting a family, anything’s possible.

“We’ll see what God has planned for me,” Brady said.