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Measuring Success...
Baby by Baby
by Eve Jacobs

The specialty of reproductive endocrinology has come a long way, baby. In the 30 plus years since its infancy, success rates have soared.

Gerson Weiss, MD, professor and chair, Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women's Health at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School

For a kid from Brooklyn's rough-and-tumble Lafayette High School, Gerson Weiss has run the mile. It was in this very locale that the 1975 TV hit Welcome Back Kotter was filmed and that John Travolta made his debut as the streetwise cutup Vinnie Barbarino. Former Sweathog Gabe Kotter, 10 years post graduation, returns to his alma mater to teach the new generation of bad boys how to survive in the school's hallowed halls. Their antics generate lots of laughs, but no academic kudos.

Not so for Lafayette alum Weiss, who took his high school diploma and New York state scholarship and kept moving. "Only 10 percent of the graduates from Lafayette went on to college," he says. "Academically, it wasn't on anyone's radar screen."

He remembers feeling a bit like a fish out of water - the public school guy in the private school setting - when he entered New York University's School of Liberal Arts, but that was short-lived. By the time he graduated with high honors in 1960, he was clearly set on a trajectory to success.

Weiss earned his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine in 1964, and completed a medical internship at Baltimore City Hospital in 1965 and an obstetrics and gynecology residency at NYU-Bellevue Medical Center in 1969. He chose to dive into a field where little was known at the time. "I like to figure out how things work," he comments. The endocrine system, particularly the human menstrual cycle, became his focus, and he came out of his residency as author of seven publications.

Weiss served two years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, attaining the rank of major, before beginning a post-doctoral research fellowship in physiology at the University of Pittsburgh in 1971. He worked in the lab of highly esteemed physiologist Ernst Knobil, whose research on the neuroendocrine control of the ovarian cycle in the rhesus monkey became the "model for the human menstrual cycle and the physiologic basis for the design of fertility and birth control agents."

But beyond Weiss' interest in the subject matter, he "learned the scientific method and critical thinking."

"Those two years were tough training," he recalls. "Many didn't make it, but for me it was a great experience." He not only survived, but left Pittsburgh with 13 scientific publications to his name. He earned board certification in obstetrics/gynecology in 1971 and in the new subspecialty of reproductive endocrinology three years later.

Back in New York, he joined the faculty of NYU School of Medicine, where he was a teacher, researcher and clinician for 15 years and was appointed professor of OB/GYN in 1980 and professor of pharmacology in 1981. He built a large practice specializing in infertility and hormonal problems and published extensively on his major research focus, relaxin. Weiss' lab is credited with the discovery that relaxin is a human hormone. Understanding exactly what role it plays in the life of the female reproductive cycle became a passion that has earned him more than 30 years of continuous funding from the NIH and publication of more than 200 scientific articles.

There was no middle ground in his career, says Weiss, who catapulted from junior scientist to recognized researcher and expert in female reproductive physiology in a decade.

In 1985, Weiss took the professional leap across the river to build a credible OB/GYN training program and reproductive endocrinology center at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School. "There wasn't much there, so it could only build upward," he comments. And upward it built.

In vitro was just coming of age at the time and Weiss' clinical program moved quickly with the changing specialty, providing the newest treatments for developmental anomalies of the reproductive tract, and ovulation and hormonal problems. In this field, there are no halfway successes. Pregnancy with a resulting live birth is the goal and success is easily measured. His program proved highly successful.

Weiss says he has had the rare good fortune to straddle two very different worlds. "When I was a resident, we couldn't measure hormones, didn't know how hormones related, had minimal tools for triggering ovulation, had low success rates in repairing abnormalities that result in infertility. Thirty years ago, one shoe fit everyone," he recalls. "Now we individualize therapy and our success rates are high. We do less and less surgery because nonsurgical approaches work."

While the specialty has undergone a sea change for the better, Weiss worries that students don't have as much enthusiasm for the future, that there are more unhappy physicians, and that he hears more discussion about finances than about medical issues.

"We thought we could do everything when I was a resident," he remembers, "so we did everything. No one complained about working hard."

He's proud to help launch the next generation. "I did what I found fun," he says, "and I've trained a fair number of residents who've gone on to be successful in their careers." He has four kids of his own - "all grown up, all successful, all happy," he says.

Over the course of his career, the physician has never shied away from national responsibilities. Today, he's chair of the American Board of OB/GYN and a member of the Executive Committee of the American Board of Medical Specialties, and travels worldwide giving lectures on his work.

Never one to rest on his laurels, 15 years ago Weiss decided to take his love of water activities to the next level. With several fellows in his department, he earned his scuba diving certification and dove headlong into a new world. Since then, he has taken 270 dives.

On his most recent dive in the Gulf of Aqaba at the tip of Sinai, he descended solo 80 feet and was awed by schools of unicorn fish, barracudas, dolphins, clown fish and corals. "It's an out-of-body experience," he says.

"It's the only time you'll ever see a whole new world." It's for this continuing ability to meet the challenges of his profession and life headlong that Gerson Weiss continues to be one of America's "top docs."