Georgeanna Seegar Jones

Georgeanna Seegar Jones (July 6, 1912 – March 26, 2005) was an American physician who with her husband, Howard W. Jones, pioneered in vitro fertilization in the United States.[1]

Georgeanna Seegar Jones
Born(1912-07-06)July 6, 1912
Baltimore, Maryland
DiedMarch 26, 2005(2005-03-26) (aged 92)
EducationGoucher College (B.A.)
Johns Hopkins University (M.D.)
Known forPioneering in-vitro fertilization
Scientific career
FieldsEndocrinology
Gynecology
Obstetrics
InstitutionsJohns Hopkins University

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.[1]

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.[2][3] 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. [4]

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 (EVMS). This was after the birth of the first test tube baby in the world, Louise Joy Brown, on July 25, 1978, in England.[1] 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.[1]

References
  1. Anahad O'Connor (March 28, 2005). "Georgeanna S. Jones, in vitro conception pioneer, dies at 92". New York Times. Retrieved December 22, 2011. Dr. Georgeanna S. Jones, who was half of a husband-and-wife team that created the first program for in vitro fertilization in the United States and its first "test tube" baby, died on Saturday at a hospital in Norfolk, Va. She was 92 and lived in Portsmouth, Va.
  2. Gey, G. O.; Seegar, G. E.; Hellman, L. M. (September 30, 1938). "The Production of a Gonadotrophic Substance (Prolan) by Placental Cells in Tissue Culture". Science. 88 (2283): 306–307. Bibcode:1938Sci....88..306G. doi:10.1126/science.88.2283.306. PMID 17843374.
  3. Epstein, Randi (2018). Aroused : the history of hormones and how they control just about everything (First ed.). W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393239607.
  4. Alderson, Thomas (December 9, 2016). "Luteal Phase Dysfunction". Medscape. Retrieved April 16, 2019.
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