Medical pioneer Georgeanna Jones dies
Published: March 27, 2005
Section: Front, page A10

© 2005- Landmark Communications Inc.
THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT Medical pioneer Dr. Georgeanna S. Jones, one half of the married couple whose work led to the birth of America's first "test-tube" baby, died Saturday of cardiac failure. She was 92 and had battled Alzheimer's disease for about a decade.


She is survived by her husband, Dr. Howard W. Jones Jr., her longtime scientific collaborator. The couple joined the staff of Norfolk's Eastern Virginia Medical School in 1978 and, three years later, celebrated the success of their program in in-vitro fertilization with the birth of Elizabeth Carr, the country's first "test-tube" baby.

Jones was widely regarded as one of the foremost female scientists of the 20th century, and was one of the nation's first reproductive endocrinologists. Work that she performed in the 1930s laid the foundation for the development of home pregnancy tests used by millions of women around the world.

She was also known for a remarkable 64-year marriage with her husband, famed as a brilliant surgeon and medical ethicist.

On Saturday, Howard Jones described their partnership as one in which "the sum of the two parts equaled more than just two. One plus one equaled about six, I think."

Georgeanna's and Howard's lives were entwined almost from their first breaths.

Georgeanna's physician-father delivered Howard in 1910, a year and a half before her birth. Howard's father was a doctor, too. The two children often played together on the lawn of Baltimore's St. Agnes Hospital while their fathers were making rounds.

When Georgeanna was 5, she was hospitalized for two months with a bone infection in her elbow. The staff's kindness impressed her so much that she announced that she would become a doctor, too. As a teenager, she considered becoming an architect. But her interest in medicine was reignited after a friend described a summer job at a tuberculosis sanatorium.

Georgeanna Jones graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore at the age of 20. During her senior year she accompanied her father to a medical society lecture given by Dr. Harvey Cushing, a pioneering neurosurgeon for whom Cushing's disease, a disorder of the pituitary gland, is named.

Georgeanna was fascinated.

"This was problem-solving," she once said in a speech. "I had always loved puzzles. And endocrinology? A brand new field? A challenge? How exciting."

Howard, already in medical school at Johns Hopkins University, was seated in the front row of the same lecture. He hadn't seen Georgeanna in years. She was slender and delicate, with blue eyes, wavy gold hair and a sparkling sense of humor.

He later invited her on a date that perhaps only Georgeanna would have accepted: visiting the pathology lab to look at slides of ovarian tumors.

They dated for eight years, finally marrying in 1940.

By that time, Georgeanna was a young star in medical research. At age 25, after graduation from Johns Hopkins' medical school, she had earned a prestigious fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. The next year, she was named director of Hopkins' reproductive physiology laboratory and leader of the hospital's gynecological endocrine clinic.

Georgeanna was the first full-time reproductive endocrinologist on the medical school faculty, studying hormonal influences in pregnancy.

In her first great breakthrough, she showed that the "pregnancy hormone," then known as prolan, was not produced in the pituitary gland, as widely thought, but in the placenta. Other scientists built on her work, and the hormone is used in home pregnancy tests sold around the world.

Over the next decades, she and Howard built worldwide reputations in their fields. They co-authored a medical journal, The Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey, for 30 years. She co-wrote five textbooks on gynecology, lectured around the globe and became the first female president of the American Fertility Society, in 1970.

But it was a dinner meeting with a young British scientist in the mid-1960s that put them on the path toward their best-known accomplishment.

He wanted to help couples conceive by extracting human eggs from a woman's ovary, fertilizing them in vitro - in a glass dish - then replacing them in their mother's uterus.

But to do it, the researcher - Dr. Robert Edwards of Cambridge University - needed to know precisely when ovulation occurred and how long eggs took to mature. Mostly, he needed eggs, which were not available in England. The Joneses, through their surgeries at Johns Hopkins, where Howard was also a faculty member, had access to egg-rich ovarian tissue.

They peppered Edwards with questions, he would remember later. Georgeanna, he said, was "sharp as a razor" and "asked the hardest questions."

But they agreed to help Edwards, and he made important progress in developing in-vitro techniques.

After their retirement from Johns Hopkins in 1978, they accepted an offer to move to Norfolk and rejoin a former colleague from Hopkins, Dr. Mason Andrews, at a fledgling institution called Eastern Virginia Medical School.

The Joneses were still moving furniture into their new home in Norfolk when they heard the news that Edwards and his partner, Dr. Patrick Steptoe, had finally succeeded. The first baby conceived through in-vitro fertilization had been born in England.

When a newspaper reporter asked if the same thing could be done in Norfolk, the Joneses said it could. A few days later, they had the money, donated by a former patient still grateful for Georgeanna's help in conceiving a child, to start their ambitious effort.

Sarah Smith-Houck of Virginia Beach became their first patient.

"Georgeanna had such a radiant smile the minute you walked in the door," Smith-Houck said in 2003. "She was such a supportive person. She'd just hug you and smile. If you needed to talk, she would always listen. Even though I was just a patient, I felt like I was part of their family."

The Joneses assembled a team of brilliant young scientists, but they had trouble duplicating the British success.

Georgeanna, who had spent years helping women conceive through hormonal stimulation, urged her team to give that a try.

It worked.

A young couple from Massachusetts, Judy and Roger Carr , were the first to conceive. Their baby, Elizabeth, was born in December 1981.

The Joneses - Georgeanna, then 69, and Howard, then 71 - were suddenly famous.

Critics denounced them for playing God, for defying the laws of nature, for encouraging immorality.

Howard assumed the role of spokesman for the couple. Georgeanna was taken aback by the harshness of the attacks.

She was a churchgoer who had counseled her younger patients against premarital sex, who - in spite of her career - told girls that a wife's primary duty was to take care of her husband.

Partly because of Georgeanna's public reticence on the controversy, she was sometimes not credited for her role in the in-vitro breakthrough. Howard often has spoken out to make sure she received that credit.

In the decades following that 1981 birth, more than 3,000 children have been born through in-vitro fertilization at EVMS' Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine. The institute remains the medical school's best-known unit, and the in-vitro techniques it helped develop are now offered at clinics throughout the world.

Dr. Alfred Z. Abuhamad, chairman of EVMS' obstetrics and gynecology department, on Saturday noted the Jones Institute's influence - and Georgeanna's role in advancing fertility medicine, in particular. He called her "a legend in the field of obstetric medicine" and said that her work has "touched every gynecologist in this country. "

The Joneses, he said, "were an awesome team. Their tremendous success has a lot to do with their friendship and their cohesiveness."

Georgeanna and Howard maintained links to the institute even after a second retirement for the couple - he is still an emeritus professor.

Georgeanna Jones first showed signs of Alzheimer's in the early 1990s, but continued to attend conferences and kept an office at the institute.

Howard, 94, recently completed a memoir honoring her and largely told through letters they had exchanged many decades before.

In interviews two years ago, he spoke of her accomplishments. She had helped raise their own three children, all successful in their careers now, while pursuing a life's work that would help thousands of couples realize once-hopeless dreams of parenthood.

And along the way, Georgeanna had inspired generations of female scientists.

On Saturday, Howard Jones said that his wife "never did lose the ability to recognize me or members of the family. As recently as two days ago, she called us by name."

He had dedicated the past two years to caring for Georgeanna. "I decided to retire also," he said. "I didn't want to carry on without her." He said he plans to resume his medical research.


* Staff writer John Warren contributed to this report.

{DOUBLE-EDIT} memorial

A memorial service for Dr. Georgeanna Seegar Jones is scheduled for Thursday at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of Lewis Hall at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk. {CAPTION} Dr. George-anna S. Jones, 92, had battled Alzheimer's disease for about a decade.bill tiernan/the virginian-pilot file photo

Dr. Georgeanna Jones and Dr. Howard Jones, shown looking at slides in his office in 1998, had worked together since the 1940s .