Dr. Georgeanna Seegar Jones was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame on Sept. 24. With her husband, Howard, she founded the first successful IVF program in the U.S., which led to the country’s first IVF birth in 1981.
Jones and Howard established Johns Hopkins’ Division of Reproductive Endocrinology in 1939 and worked there until 1978, when mandatory retirement rules required them to leave. They joined Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk and opened an IVF clinic. Their daughter said Georgeanna began using her own treatment methods after the clinic’s initial results were unsuccessful.
The first U.S. IVF baby, Elizabeth Carr, was born on Dec. 28, 1981, to Roger and Judy Carr. Their application to the Joneses’ program was one of 50 accepted from more than 5,000. In March, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine reported that U.S. IVF births exceeded 100,000 in a single year for the first time.
