Professor Pursues Love Of Climbing in Antarctica

Discovery, adrenaline, penguins, ice, snow, and a deserted continent make for quite an adventure. With little appetite for canned tour group outings, pioneering explorer Dr. Samuel Silverstein, the John C. Dalton professor in the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, set his sights on a climbing expedition to Antarctica-twice.

In December 2006, Silverstein trekked to Antarctica along with a group of other explorers for a 40th anniversary climb of their discovery of Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica, located 750 miles from the South Pole. After two weeks of intense training in Colorado, he traveled by plane to Antarctica through Dallas, and Santiago and Punta Arenas, Chile.

Silverstein began climbing as a child, falling in love with mountains, rocks, and ice after attending a climbing camp called Camp Adirondacks in New York. Climbing at a training center in Colorado Springs after high school, he trained with some of the world's top climbers and heard lectures about expeditions to the Himalayas and Everest.

"I was fascinated by the idea that there were large parts of the world that had never been mapped and had never seen human presence," he said. "I thought that maybe I could one day find a part of the world untouched and untrodden."

First on his list after arriving at Dartmouth University as an undergraduate was to join the Dartmouth Outing Club, where he trained among other undergraduates who were already exploring some of the world's top peaks. In 1959, he had his first chance at charting unexplored territory, mapping and climbing peaks of the Battle Range in British Columbia where he named a number of peaks after the books of author Herman Melville.

While attending medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Silverstein continued to climb.

"At one point I even gained permission to dodge a six-week public health course in order to perform experiments on a climbing expedition in Alaska," he adds.

In 1962, Silverstein and fellow climbers Charles Hollister and Peter Schoening, along with other members of the American Alpine Club, began lobbying the National Science Foundation to support an expedition to Antarctica. After four years, the National Science Foundation and National Geographic Magazine agreed to sponsor their trip, officially named the American Antarctic Mountaineering Expedition of 1966/67.

"We are not sure why they finally decided to support the expedition," he says. "But Woodrow Wilson's grandson, Woodrow Wilson Sayre, was planning to climb there and I think they wanted to avoid an expensive and publicized rescue mission."

In December 1966, Silverstein along with Hollister, Schoening, and climbers Bill Long, Dick Wahlstrom, Barry Corbet, Eiichi Fukushima, Brian Marts, John Evans and Nick Clinch arrived in Antarctica via New Zealand then McMurdo and Byrd Stations, making the first ever ascents of Vinson, Tyree, Shinn, Gardner, Ostenso and Long Gables.

Silverstein's fascination for uncharted geographical territory is also carried over into his profession. As a scientist, he has explored cellular biology, cellular immunology, experimental pathology, and infectious diseases. His interests in endocytosis, viruses, and the immune system led to his life-long studies of the structure and function of phagocytic leukocytes, the first demonstration that the lysosome is the intracellular site of uncoating of an animal virus, and the discovery of evidence for the "zipper" mechanism of phagocytosis.

"Mountains, skiing, ice-climbing, working in the laboratory are all forms of exploring," says Silverstein. "And exploring is something I will never tire of."