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The McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine was created to
further the understanding of human heredity and genetic medicine,
and use that knowledge to treat and prevent disease.

The Institute is working to consolidate all relevant teaching, patient
careand research in human and medical genetics at Johns Hopkins
and to provide national and international leadership in genetic
medicine. It willserve as a focal point for interactions between
diverse investigators to promote the application of genetic discoveries
to human disease and genetics education to the public. It will build
upon past strengths and further develop expertise in the areas of
genomics, developmental genetics, and complex disease genetics. In
addition, it will catalyze the spread of human genetic perspectives to
other related disciplines by collaboration with other departments within
Hopkins.

In 1965, Robert Edwards spent six weeks at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine working as a visiting fellow with Howard W. Jones Jr., M.D., then head of the crytogenetics laboratory, trying to fertilize human eggs in a laboratory test tube. They failed. Or so they thought when they published their results as “Attempts to Fertilize the Human Egg in Vitro” in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

“We worked all summer on that,” says Jones, who with his wife, Georgeanna Seegar Jones, M.D., later went on to Eastern Virginia Medical Center in Norfolk, where he oversaw the first successful in vitro fertilized baby in the United States, born in 1981. “One of the criteria … was that you need to see the sperm tail in the egg.  We could never see the sperm tail, so Bob did not claim fertilization in the paper that was written.” Years later, they realized they had been wrong about that — and fertilization had, indeed, occurred. Read more...

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