The Golden Age and Its Implosion

Book excerpt: The Golden Age and Its Implosion' is the final volume of a trilogy, "The Journey" in which Dr. Emil Steinberger recounts his experiences from childhood to adulthood during and after World War II. In this last volume we follow Emil, after he volunteered for service in the Navy, from Detroit, Michigan to Portsmouth, Virginia where he enters the Navy Medical Corps and serves at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital. Moving on to his assignment station at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland he discovers his passion for basic research and his desire to combine it with a clinical practice in the field of Reproductive Endocrinology. He is swept up in the surge of young people joining the medical ranks with a new sense of optimism and enthusiasm bolstered by a wave of recent medical discoveries and support for research by government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. After returning to Detroit and completing his medical training, he follows a singular and productive career path in Philadelphia where he pursues his clinical and research interests and helps create one of the first multi-disciplinary medical groups. However, his ideas about the purposes and methods of conducting research and delivering medical care are threatened by the views of some of a new breed of hospital bureaucrats. Ultimately, he leaves Philadelphia to create a unique department at an exciting new medical school in Houston, Texas. There he brings together a faculty with varying expertise and experience to work collaboratively on new scientific discoveries and treatments for couples with infertility and other reproductive endocrine disorders. Throughout his life, Emil is repeatedly placed in positions of leadership; in the Navy, at Detroit Receiving Hospital, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, at University of Texas Medical School, and finally at the private Texas Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Endocrinology. He learns important lessons in these positions which he endeavors to pass on to the younger scientists training with him. During the course of his full life and successful professional career, he crystallizes and refines his ideas about research, medicine, and life in general. When he succumbed to lung cancer before finishing this memoir, his wife and life-long soul mate and research collaborator, Anna Steinberger, PhD, completed for us the story of this man's remarkable life.