America’s First Test-Tube Baby Turns 25

You’ve probably never heard of Elizabeth Carr. She turns 25 today. Her birthday is worth mentioning for just one important reason: On December 28, 1981, she became the very first baby born from in-vitro fertilization in the United States. She achieved life because of the hard work and technical achievement of two gifted researchers who tackled the scientific problem of IVF late in their lives—and forever changed the possibilities for human reproduction.

In the summer of 1978, two fertility doctors at Johns Hopkins University, Howard and Georgeanna Jones, were getting ready to retire. Before reaching the university’s mandatory retirement age of 65, Georgeanna had been director of its Laboratory of Reproductive Physiology. Howard, her husband and two years her senior, had been the director of the university’s international program on fertility control. Now they planned to spend a few years teaching at Eastern Virginia Medical School, in Norfolk, Virginia, and then, following their three children’s advice, spend their time fishing.

But the same day the couple arrived in Norfolk, on July 25, 1978, Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, was born in England. The Joneses had worked with one of the English researchers, Robert Edwards, on some limited human-embryo experiments back in the summer of 1965, but they hadn’t thought to pursue Edwards’s goal of human in-vitro fertilization on their own.

That began to change when a local newspaper reporter showed up to get a comment. As she was leaving, the reporter asked Howard whether he thought test-tube babies could happen in Norfolk. “And it sounded like a flip question, and I gave her a flip answer,” Howard recalled many years later. “I said, ‘Of course.’ And she said, ‘What would it take?’ And I said, ‘It would take some money.’” After Howard’s offhand comment was published, a former patient of the Joneses’ telephoned them and said, “I see by the paper you need some money. How much do you need?”

According to the 2004 book Pandora’s Baby, by Robin Marantz Henig, a history of IVF, the benefactor was a “Norfolk grand dame” who had been a patient at the Joneses’ Baltimore fertility clinic. Her fertility treatments had been successful; she had gotten pregnant and had a baby girl, which she named Georgia in honor of Georgeanna. When word got to her that the Joneses might be interested in opening an IVF clinic in Norfolk, she offered them a sizable anonymous donation to get things started.

In March 1980 the Joneses, their plans for retirement forgotten, opened the first in-vitro fertilization clinic in the United States. Despite the controversy surrounding the idea of test-tube babies—most of the opposition was from anti-abortion groups that objected that some embryos would be destroyed—thousands of women quickly contacted them, wanting to undergo IVF.

But IVF remained a difficult procedure. In the two years since the birth of Louise Brown, there had been only a few successful IVF babies born worldwide. During their first year of work, the Joneses also had no success, despite 30 attempts. Part of the problem lay in the difficulty of harvesting eggs from female patients. The researchers had to rely on the women’s natural menstrual cycles to dictate when they could attempt to extract eggs, a catch-as-catch-can procedure that was often unsuccessful.

Georgeanna Jones, however, decided to use hormone therapy to stimulate the women’s egg production. The hormones allowed the researchers to harvest more eggs and to collect them at fixed times—both factors that greatly increased the chances for success.

One of the first to try the hormone therapy, in early 1981, was Judy Carr, a 28-year-old Massachusetts schoolteacher who had had her fallopian tubes removed during emergency surgery following an unsuccessful pregnancy months before, making her entirely unable to become pregnant by normal methods. After weeks of hormone injections, the Joneses managed to extract two of Carr’s eggs, fertilize one in a laboratory with her husband Roger’s sperm, and implant the egg in her uterus. The procedure worked. Nine months later, on December 28, 1981, Judy Carr gave birth to a healthy baby daughter, Elizabeth Jordan Carr.

Thanks in large part to the Joneses’ technological advances, IVF soon became a widespread and dependable procedure. Within just a few years hundreds of test-tube babies were born worldwide. Today more than two million people around the world are the products of IVF, and more than 400,000 IVF babies have been born in the United States alone.

The Joneses continued to work together until 1996, when Georgeanna retired; she developed Alzheimer’s disease, and she died of a heart attack in 2005, at 92. Elizabeth Carr, by then a healthy young woman in her twenties, said of Georgeanna’s legacy in an article she wrote for The New York Times, “She wasn’t special because she helped develop a reproductive technology. She was special because she helped my parents have me.”