Georgeanna Seegar Jones


Georgeanna Seegar Jones was an American physician who with her husband, Howard W. Jones, pioneered in vitro fertilization in the United States.

Early life

She was born July 6, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland, to J. King Seegar. She had two siblings. She obtained her B.A. from Goucher College and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1936.

Career

As a resident at Johns Hopkins, she discovered that the pregnancy hormone hCG was manufactured by the placenta, not the pituitary gland as originally thought. This discovery led to the development of many of the early over-the-counter pregnancy test kits currently available. On 1949, Jones made the first description of Luteal Phase Dysfunction and is credited to be the first in using progesterone to treat women with a history of miscarriages, thus allowing many of them to not only conceive, but to deliver healthy babies.
She became the director of Johns Hopkins' Laboratory of Reproductive Physiology and was the Gynecologist-in-Charge of the hospital's gynecologic endocrinology clinic in 1939. She married Howard W. Jones while at Johns Hopkins and they had three children.

Later life

In 1978 she and her husband left Johns Hopkins for Eastern Virginia Medical School. This was after the birth of the first test tube baby in the world, Louise Joy Brown, on July 25, 1978, in England. The Joneses created their own IVF program at EVMS. On December 28, 1981, their procedure gave birth to Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American test tube baby.
Jones died on March 26, 2005, in Portsmouth, Virginia.