Howard W. Jones

Howard W. Jones
Jones in a 2010 interview
Born	Howard Wilbur Jones, Jr. (1910-12-30)December 30, 1910 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Died	July 31, 2015(2015-07-31) (aged 104) Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Medical career
Profession	Medicine
Institutions	Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Eastern Virginia Medical School
Specialism	In vitro fertilization

Howard Wilbur Jones, Jr. (December 30, 1910 – July 31, 2015) was an American gynecological surgeon and in vitro fertilization (IVF) specialist. Jones and his wife, Georgeanna Seegar Jones, were two of the earliest reproductive medicine specialists in the United States. They established the reproductive medicine center that was responsible for the birth of the first IVF baby in the U.S. He wrote articles on the beginning of human personhood and testified before legislators on the same subject. He was one of the early physicians to perform sex reassignment surgeries.

Jones was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from the 1940s until his mandatory retirement from the institution in 1978. He and his wife moved to Virginia and were affiliated with Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS). Jones retired in the 1990s, but he continued to write and spent time at EVMS until shortly before his death.

Jones was born in Baltimore to Howard Wilbur Jones, Sr. and Edith Ruth Marling Jones on December 30, 1910. Even though he lived in the city, Jones was educated for a few years in a rural public school to avoid the city public school system. When Jones was a child, he went on house calls and hospital visits with his father, who was a physician. Jones's father died when he was 13 years old. Jones's mother moved him to a private school after the death of his father.

He earned an undergraduate degree from Amherst College in 1931 and a medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1935. Jones completed a residency in surgery and then joined the U.S. Army during World War II, leading an Auxiliary Surgical Group team in Patton's Third Army. After the war, Jones was invited to complete a second residency in gynecology.

Jones and his wife joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins on a part-time basis in 1948. He was the initial treating physician of Henrietta Lacks when she presented to Johns Hopkins with cancer in 1951. Jones took a biopsy of Lacks's tumor and, without her permission, sent samples to his laboratory colleagues. The cells, later known as HeLa cells, grew at an astonishing rate in the lab and were shipped and sold to researchers for various purposes. Research with the cells helped to facilitate medical breakthroughs, including the vaccines for polio and human papillomavirus, though controversy later arose because the cells were being used without the knowledge of Lacks or her family. Jones's role in the Lacks case was described in the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.