Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Dr. Georgeanna Seegar Jones, the pioneering endocrinologist whose studies of the female reproductive system laid the foundation for the modern home pregnancy test and who, with her husband, Howard, brought into being the first artificially conceived infant in the United States, died Saturday at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk, Va.

She was 92 and had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for nearly a decade, but the immediate cause of death was heart failure, said an official of Eastern Virginia Medical School, where the couple spent the last two decades of their joint career.

When British physicians Dr. Patrick C. Steptoe and Dr. Robert Edwards announced the birth of Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby” in the world, July 25, 1978, the Joneses had just completed distinguished careers at Johns Hopkins University and were moving into a planned semiretirement at the newly created eastern Virginia school. When a visiting reporter asked Howard Jones whether the same thing could be done in the United States, he said offhandedly that of course it could. All it would require was some money for research.

A few days later, a former patient of Georgeanna’s, grateful for her help in conceiving after many years of difficulty, offered them the money to get started. Three years later, on Dec. 28, 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr became the first U.S. baby to be conceived outside her mother’s body, and Howard and Georgeanna, then 71 and 69, respectively, became famous.

Novak’s Textbook of Gynecology
Home pregnancy tests at eBay.com

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