Dr. Howard W. Jones, half of the husband-and-wife team whose pioneering medical work led to the birth of the first IVF baby in the United States, died Friday in Virginia. He was 104.

Jones' death was announced by Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS), where he and his wife, Dr. Georgeanna Jones, did their most famous work starting in 1978 -- after they reached the mandatory retirement age at their previous jobs at Johns Hopkins University.

The couple opened the nation's first clinic for in vitro fertilization at EVMS in Norfolk in 1979, the year after the world's first "test-tube baby," Louise Brown, was born in England.

In 1981, their clinic achieved success with the first IVF pregnancy in the U.S., and in December of that year, a healthy baby girl, Elizabeth Carr, was born.