Georgeanna Seegar Jones, a 1936 graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a pioneer of reproductive endocrinology, is being inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in a Sept. 24 ceremony in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

Seegar Jones, who died in 2005, advanced understandings of miscarriage and fertility and founded, with her husband, the first in vitro fertilization program in the nation.

Her research and clinical accomplishments are numerous and include identifying a defect that caused miscarriages, using progesterone to help those women carry to term, and showing that menopausal gonadotropin would increase the number of eggs available for in vitro fertilization.

In 1970, she became the first woman president of the American Fertility Society, now known as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Seegar Jones received honorary doctorate degrees from Goucher, Amherst College, Old Dominion University and the Medical College of Hampton Roads.

“She had a huge and lasting impact on the field of reproductive medicine,” says James Segars, the Howard W. Jones Jr., M.D., and Georgeanna Seegar Jones, M.D., Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics at Johns Hopkins.

Segars first met Seegar Jones in the mid-1980s, when he was a fellow at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and Seegar Jones would visit the IVF program being led by Anne Wentz, with whom she had trained. Later, Seegar Jones would sometimes call him when he was at the National Institutes of Health, Segars says.

“She knew I was interested in recurrent miscarriage, so she’d ask what I thought about specific patients. I was quite enamored with her. She was just so inquisitive, very humble. She was very famous at that point, but down to earth.”

Georgeanna Seegar Jones

Born in Baltimore in 1912, Seegar Jones attended Girls Latin and Goucher College before making her mark at Johns Hopkins. In 1939, she became the inaugural director of the Division of Gynecologic Endocrinology at Johns Hopkins, making her the first full-time gynecologic endocrinologist on any medical school faculty in the United States. She became a full professor in 1972, the fourth woman to achieve that rank at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Seegar Jones and her husband, Howard Wilbur Jones Jr., both children of prominent Baltimore physicians and both graduates of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, worked together as professors of gynecology who advanced understanding of the hormones that cause infertility and serial miscarriages.

They were co-editors of Gynecological & Obstetrical Survey from 1957 to 1982, and in 1986 were both named honorary fellows of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Their portrait, painted by Baltimore artist Henry Cooper in 1977, was the first Johns Hopkins portrait showing a husband and wife on the same canvas.

“Dr. Howard and Dr. Georgeanna have always been such a closely knit and harmonious team that whenever you speak of one you automatically include the other,” notes the 1991 book The First 100 Years, written by Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics faculty members.

Forced to retire from Johns Hopkins in 1978 because they were 65 (Jones was allowed to stay one more year to align his departure with his younger wife’s), they moved to Eastern Virginia Medical School and together founded the nation’s first in vitro fertilization program. Their work led to the nation’s first successful IVF birth in 1981.

The story — told in The First 100 Years — is that the Joneses had just arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1978 and were setting up their house when the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born in England. A reporter, interviewing them amid their moving boxes, asked what it would take to start a similar program in the U.S. “Money,” said Jones, and the next day the donations began.

Jones died in 2015. The couple had three children: Howard W. Jones III, who was director of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at Vanderbilt and died in 2019; Georgeanna Jones Klingensmith, who was director of pediatric endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Colorado; and Lawrence Jones, a financial consultant.

The National Women’s Hall of Fame, incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1969, honors and celebrates distinguished American women. This year, Seegar Jones is being inducted alongside nine other remarkable women, living and dead, including poet and activist Audre Lorde, World War II spy Virginia Hall Goillot and economist Janet L. Yellen.