About Our Faculty

Gary J. Myers, M.D.

Ask Gary Myers to describe the path that led to an internationally recognized career in child neurology and environmental medicine, and he’ll tell you that path was actually headed somewhere else.

I always loved animals and really wanted to be a zoologist,” Dr. Myers recalls, “but I was in Australia [on a Fulbright Fellowship] when I applied to UC Berkeley for their PhD program in biology. The mail was slow, my application was late, and they never even opened it. So I ended up going to medical school instead.”

Dr. Myers had decided that being a doctor would make him more valuable on zoological expeditions because “they always need doctors in those remote locations. I meant to get my PhD in biology later on, but I got caught up in medicine and never looked back,” he says.

A native of southeastern Kansas, it was natural for Dr. Myers to receive his medical education at the University of Kansas School of Medicine (1963) where he chose pediatrics because of early mentoring by a caring pediatrician and a love of children.

Dr. Myers demonstrated his quiet self-confidence and adventurous spirit early in his career by applying only to Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins for his pediatric residency, with Harvard the chosen program. “There were some who thought you couldn’t, or maybe shouldn’t, get to Harvard from Kansas,” he recalls. “In fact one of my chief residents felt exactly that way.”

Fortunately the other chief resident was Dr. John Green who gave the young Kansan lots of advice and encouragement (Dr. Green went on to become one of Rochester’s most beloved pediatricians).

While at Harvard, Dr. Myers realized he would most enjoy a career in academic medicine, and that would require an area of further specialization. “Every pediatrician in the country knew more than I did about pediatrics, so I figured I’d better specialize.” Dr. Myers chose neurology -- because he liked the systematic organization of the nervous system -- and was fortunate to study and work under Dr. Derrick Denny-Brown at The Boston City Hospital. Two years in the army at Ft. Bragg and another two years at Boston Children’s Hospital working under Dr. Charles Barlow completed Dr. Myers’ training and he was offered his “first real job” … in Rochester, New York.

David Van Dyke was a year ahead of me at Boston Children’s and he had gone to Rochester,” Myers recalls. “David told me they needed a child neurologist, so I applied and Fred Horner hired me [in 1971].”

As part of his early responsibilities, Dr. Myers took on the role as director of the Birth Defects Center –a multidisciplinary clinic where children with spina bifida and other complex illnesses could be seen by multiple specialists in one visit. He was also director of the Pediatric Neurology Chronic Care Unit at Monroe Community Hospital.

It was during those early years in Rochester that Dr. Myers had the opportunity to explore what has become the highlight of his professional life: the study of methyl mercury and its effect on fetal brain development.

My friend, the late Dr. David Marsh [an adult neurologist at Strong], was invited to Iraq to examine children who had been exposed in utero at the time of an epidemic of mercury poisoning from preserved seed grain,” Dr. Myers recalls. “He needed a pediatric neurologist to assist him and invited me.” Dr. Myers subsequently made several trips to Iraq which he found stimulating and challenging, no doubt rekindling the expedition dream he had long abandoned.

Dr. Myers left Rochester in 1978 for the University of Alabama at Birmingham where he soon was named director of the Sparks Center – a training facility for professionals working with individuals with intellectual disabilities (mental retardation), a post he held for 10 years.

But he never lost interest in mercury or contact with Dr. Marsh, who was by then beginning a research project to determine if low-level exposure to methyl mercury – such as that a pregnant woman could obtain from eating fish – would effect her fetus’ developing brain.

While still in Birmingham, Dr. Myers signed on to do a pilot study with Dr. Marsh in the Republic of Seychelles, an idyllic island nation in the Indian Ocean, where fish is a major diet staple and methyl mercury levels from natural sources are elevated.

In 1989 Dr. Myers left Birmingham to rejoin the Rochester mercury research team. He moved to Seychelles where he lived for a year, examining and enrolling families to study the fetal risk. These longitudinal studies, which over 20 years have grown to include more than 2,000 mother/child pairs and a large international contingent of researchers, have been supported almost exclusively by the Environmental Health Sciences section of NIH.

Outcomes of the studies – which have yet to show any negative effects of methyl mercury from fish consumption – have been published extensively in journals such as The Lancet, JAMA, and Neurotoxicology.

The studies have also placed Dr. Myers and his research colleagues (including Drs. Tom Clarkson of Environmental Medicine and Dr. Philip Davidson of Pediatrics) at the center of a political maelstrom involving the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and environmentalists.

We have presented our findings to Congressional committees and international meetings,” Dr. Myers says. “People often try to pull us into the political fray but we try to stay focused on the science. However, it does make for a very interesting life.”

Today, Dr. Myers balances a busy professional life that includes his research in Seychelles, related travel, and speaking engagements all over the world, as well as teaching Child Neurology and clinical practice.

For fun he flies his own plane, and co-owns a local flight school – AirVenture Aviation – so he can take to the clouds when life in medicine overwhelms.

While he looks back on a very rich and fulfilling career in Rochester, he looks ahead with confidence about the division’s future as well.

One of the most exciting things is the outstanding training program in Child Neurology that we have been developing since Jon Mink’s arrival as division chief,” Myers says. “The future of Child Neurology at Rochester has never been brighter. ”

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