Emil was born in Poland in the town of Buczacz (now located in Ukraine) on 27 August 1941. He miraculously escaped the Nazi death camps as an infant but lost many family members. He was raised by his adoptive Skamene family in the Czech Republic. He obtained his MD and PhD degrees from Charles University in Prague; he then undertook post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School in Boston and completed his specialty in allergy and immunology at McGill, where he remained.

Emil was a pioneer of, and internationally recognized for, the study of the host genetic basis of susceptibility to infections. His work rejected the then dominating microorganism-centric view of infectious disease and was a watershed for infectious diseases research. He was inspired by the landmark studies of Lurie and Dannenberg, who from the 1930s onward bred inbred strains of rabbits that were inherently resistant and susceptible to aerosol infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. He would often refer to similar work on M. tuberculosis by Wright and Lewis in hamsters and Lynch and Dubos in mice as planting the seeds for his own work1.

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