Embryologists reflect on science, faith and their life-giving work
Jim Kontio knows what it’s like to lose. After he and his wife Meganne married, the couple quickly decided that they wanted a baby. They were both older, Kontio says, and realized that they were running out of time. What seemed tough in the beginning became tougher as Kontio’s wife suffered from several complications, was hospitalized and miscarried their first child.
“There were a lot of times that we never knew if we were going to be successful,” he says. Kontio managed the in vitro fertilization laboratory at Fertility Unlimited in Akron, Ohio, and reached out for help. He and his wife became infertility patients, and after a successful round of ovulation induction and intrauterine insemination, they conceived twins.
Thirteen years later, Kontio, now 48, works as a senior embryologist at the new Southern Illinois University Fertility and In Vitro Fertilization Center at the SIU School of Medicine. The facility formally opened in January and already at an early stage in the program, the staff has seen several positive pregnancies. Kontio feels blessed, he says, to help parents stuck in the same situation that he once faced.
“I understand where these people are coming from, and their feeling of desperation, the feeling of disappointment, the loss,” Kontio says. “I can tell them, too, that being persistent, sticking with it and believing in the people who are providing the service to you makes all the difference in the world.”
Kontio and Vicki Gindlesperger make up the embryology team, led by laboratory director Dr. Mary Ellen McAsey. “The lab” performs such tasks as measuring male and female hormone levels, analyzing the motility and shape of sperm or assisting with IVF — the procedure in which eggs are retrieved from a woman’s ovaries, fertilized with sperm in the laboratory and placed inside the woman’s uterus after they become embryos. Between the three of them, they boast 74 years of experience in treating patients with reproductive and endocrine problems.
These senior embryologists aren’t your typical lab technicians. Sure, they demand pristine work conditions and relish high-tech instrumentation.
But they also crave patient contact. They don’t want to “fill a niche service,” as Kontio puts it — they want to make a difference. They even go against the scientific grain and believe that a higher power guides their creation of other human beings.
When Kontio and Gindlesperger discuss their work, they don’t use the words gametes or embryos. They call themselves temporary foster parents, given charge to a lab full of other people’s babies. The fact that these babies inhabit incubators or freezers doesn’t matter to them or their patients.
“Believe me, [the parents] think of them as their children,” Gindlesperger says. “They don’t think of them as my eggs, my sperm.”
Like Kontio, Gindlesperger understands the plight of her patients. She gave birth to two children (her son followed in her footsteps and became an embryologist), but couldn’t conceive any others. Gindlesperger, who’s now 63, says that at the time, no one even mentioned the possibility of polycystic ovarian syndrome, a common cause of women’s infertility that affects hormone levels, periods and ovulation.
Gindlesperger worked her way through Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland at a tissue culture laboratory and graduated in 1969. After raising her kids, she trained as an embryologist with Cleveland’s Mt. Sinai Medical Center LIFE program, which was responsible for the first surrogate birth in the United States.
She helped start a new program at University- MacDonald Women’s Hospital in Cleveland, where she worked alongside Dr. J. Ricardo Loret de Mola, the current practice director of the SIU Fertility and IVF Center. After opening a private program at Reproductive Medicine Associates of Texas, Gindlesperger made her way to SIU in early 2009. Kontio, who also helped design and set up three programs, didn’t start in embryology either. He wanted to be a doctor until his professor at Adrian College in Michigan encouraged him to accept a graduate school gig in reproductive physiology at Michigan State University. Kontio studied squirrel monkeys, baboons and chimpanzees at the school’s endocrine research center. In 1984, he moved to an IVF position at Akron City Hospital in Ohio. He then worked in a private-practice setting at Fertility Unlimited for 15 years before joining SIU in 2008. Even though Kontio and Gindlesperger just met earlier this year, they already share more than the storage closet-sized office space on the lower level of the SIU Clinics/Moy Building.
They both moved to Springfield ahead of their families to accept the embryology positions.
continued on page 12
