In 1974, Schulman joined the staff of the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development where he headed the Section on Human Biochemical Genetics. He founded and was first Director of the Interinstitute Program in Medical Genetics, remaining at the National Institutes of Health until 1983. During this period, the major research contributions of Schulman and his associates were in the field of the
inborn errors of metabolism, especially diseases of sulfur metabolism. They demonstrated that
cystinosis is a
lysosomal storage disease caused by hereditary absence of the transmembrane lysosomal carrier for
cystine, and proved that the
enzyme gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase was not, contrary to current theory, required for normal transcellular
amino acid transport. Schulman and David Cogan of the
National Eye Institute were also the first to utilize
cysteamine eyedrops for treatment of the painful
photophobia and ocular crystals characteristic of cystinosis, and this treatment is widely utilized today. The prevention of abnormal genital masculinization in female fetuses with
congenital adrenal hyperplasia by prenatal administration of
dexamethasone to the mother, first proposed and utilized by Schulman and his colleagues at
NIH, has also become a widely accepted therapy. In 1984, Schulman founded the
Genetics & IVF Institute, which has pioneered the development and early introduction of numerous innovative diagnoses and treatments in human genetics and infertility, and is now an international company in these fields. The institute was the first in the United States to introduce transvaginal non-surgical IVF (replacing
laparoscopy and now the standard method worldwide), and also to report pregnancies using ICSI (
intracytoplasmic sperm injection) for the treatment of severe male
infertility. The institute also was one of the first centers in the world to introduce
chorionic villus sampling (CVS) as an earlier alternative to
amniocentesis for
prenatal diagnosis, the first to offer clinical testing for certain common mutations in the
BRCA1 and
BRCA2 genes, considered to be responsible for a significant fraction of hereditary
breast cancers, and the first to offer prenatal testing for
cystic fibrosis. Schulman and associates also developed the world's first system for the use of non-disclosing preimplantation
genetic testing for the prevention of
Huntington disease. More recently, Schulman and his colleagues have established that flow-cytometric sorting (MicroSort) of living
human sperm can modify the proportion of viable X-bearing and Y-bearing sperm and that such technology can increase the proportion of girls or boys born after
insemination with sorted sperm. This innovation was notable for improving the ability to choose the sex of a child conceived by the above-cited methods. Decades after its introduction, fetal genetic testing is increasingly used, despite some initial hesitancy to adopt it. The institute, under Schulman's direction, was responsible for starting the first modern genetics/infertility treatment center in
Shanghai,
China, one of the largest IVF programs in the world. Schulman was CEO of the Genetics & IVF Institute until 1998, and was chairman of its board of directors to 2024. He previously served as an affiliate professor at the medical schools of
Virginia Commonwealth University and the
University of California, San Diego. Schulman is the author of
Robert G. Edwards: A Personal Viewpoint, a personal account of Nobel Laureate,
Robert G. Edwards, and events relevant to the development of modern methods of assisted reproduction. ==References==