The career expectation of many men in West Virginia was to become a coal miner after graduating from high school. Because Anthony Johnson, D.O., had no desire to mine coal, he ended up attending Fairmont State College to obtain a business degree — though he wasn’t interested in business, either.
“My father wouldn’t allow me to go to any other universities because they were ‘party schools,’ so I went to Fairmont to get a business degree. My dad was an accountant and I was going to join the family business. I was in accounting classes for about six weeks and thought there was no way I was going to do it for a living,” Johnson said. “I thought it was absolutely the worst, but I stuck it out for a year.”
He switched to taking biology and chemistry courses. One of his lab professors asked him what he planned to do with his life. Since Johnson was unsure, the professor suggested that a bachelor’s degree in biology would provide career options in teaching or graduate school for dentistry or medicine. Johnson decided to pursue the latter, so he shifted gears once again and began rigorously studying for five hours each night every Monday through Thursday in the science hall with other pre-med students.
“My energy is really focused, and I was blessed with the fact that I have a lot of tenacity,” he said. “I’ve always been a mediocre student, but my successes have been based on not accepting the word ‘no.’ You can always find a way to do things, and I’ve never let a door shut. Any door that was open I knew I could step through.”
He eventually was accepted to medical school at WVSOM, and he graduated in 1980. He completed a fellowship in maternal-fetal medicine at Pennsylvania Hospital and a fellowship in medical genetics at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, both in Philadelphia.
Johnson is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology, maternal-fetal medicine and clinical genetics. He later served as director of the Division of Reproductive Genetics at Wayne State University and director of the Fetal Intervention Program and Maternal Serum Screening Laboratory in the Division of
Maternal Fetal Medicine at North Carolina Women’s Hospital in Chapel Hill, N.C., prior to relocating to Houston in 2006.
He has spent the past 35 years providing medical care and treatment to unborn babies.
Johnson began his career as a maternal-fetal medicine specialist but now focuses solely on fetal diagnosis and therapy. He said being a fetal medicine specialist is a high-risk career, but that he has been driven his entire life to prove himself in high-stakes scenarios.
“I’m not the kind of person who could deal with a chronic disease. I’m not going to be the one who takes care of diabetes or chronic hypertension,” he said. “Toward the end of my third year of medical school, I narrowed my interests to an intensive care unit in the emergency room or OB-GYN.”
He has been a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and Pediatric Surgery and co-director of the Fetal Center at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston since 2011. Prior to joining the center, he was a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery and the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He was also a senior maternal-fetal medicine physician in the Texas Children’s Hospital Fetal Center team.
“One of the big things we do is evaluate pregnancies in women who have had a previous history with a problem or are suspected to have a problem. When you hear about maternal-fetal surgery programs, it can sound glamorous, but in the majority of cases we are making the diagnosis and directing the pregnancy management more often than doing actual maternal-fetal surgery,” Johnson said. “One of the gratifying aspects of my career in the field has been the reduction in maternal morbidity as we moved from major operative procedures to minimally invasive intervention, such as the repair of fetal spina bifida using small telescopes to enter the uterus instead of performing a hysterotomy.”
Johnson has performed more than 500 fetoscopic procedures, the majority of which were laser ablation procedures in the treatment of severe twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. He has extensive experience with other fetal interventions, including shunt and needle-guided in utero procedures.
“I’m not an end-of-life guy, I’m a beginning-of-life guy. My colleagues and I are continually working to develop new and innovative interventions for disorders that were previously known to be lethal or severely debilitating to the neonate or infant. A patient is at the end of the road when they get to the Fetal Center during their pregnancy. We start evaluations before the baby has been delivered and we have the ability to change outcomes. I recently received a picture from a patient whose baby we treated in utero. This child was celebrating their first birthday, a birthday the child would most likely not have had without the intervention, and I thought, ‘Wow, what a wonderful way to start the day,’” he said.
The hospital in which Johnson works is an international referral center that also emphasizes research. The program is committed not only to the clinical side but the research side of medicine, so what physicians find in the lab can be brought into practice at the bedside.
In surgery, a patient’s successful outcome relies on every medical professional involved, not just the physician performing the surgery. Johnson said he finds fulfillment in being part of a team.
“The reality of a positive patient outcome is the strength of the postnatal team,” he said. “I can do a whole lot of things to a fetus, but if I don’t have a postnatal team that’s ready to run the second leg of this relay race with me, then the fetal intervention doesn’t make sense. That’s the beauty of this program — having that teamwork.”