Janet B. Hardy | Pediatrics pioneer, 92

Janet B. Hardy, 92, a Johns Hopkins University pediatrics professor who led a pioneering study of mothers and children that provided a wealth of information on teen pregnancy, medical concerns and social issues, died Oct. 23 at a retirement community in Glen Arm, Md.

Dr. Hardy helped design the Collaborative Perinatal Project, a wide-reaching federal study of 60,000 expectant mothers and their children, that began in 1957. She was the lead researcher for the Baltimore portion of the 12-city project, which focused largely on inner-city mothers and the physical and social development of their children.

Dr. Hardy personally followed 4,000 Baltimore mothers and their children throughout the study and published dozens of groundbreaking papers. Among other things, she was the first researcher to document the serious dangers of rubella, or German measles, during pregnancy and how the disease could lead to birth defects.

Long after the first phases of the project had ended, Dr. Hardy returned to her early subjects and examined how they had fared in life. She discovered a clear relation between a mother's age and her child's well-being later in life.

Researchers had little information about younger mothers until Dr. Hardy showed that the children of girls younger than 18 had lower IQ and other problems.

All other conditions being equal, Dr. Hardy found, children born to mothers in their late 20s appeared to have a greater chance of educational, financial and social success.

She was born in British Columbia. Her father, a doctor, once told her: "No daughter of mine is ever going to be a physician."

After graduating from the University of British Columbia, Dr. Hardy nonetheless went to medical school at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1941 with a specialty in pediatrics. She was one of five women in a class of 150. She came to Johns Hopkins a year later and established the first neonatology ward at its hospital.

Dr. Hardy spent six years as director of the Baltimore Health Department's Bureau of Child Hygiene before returning to Johns Hopkins in 1957 to direct the Collaborative Perinatal Project.

Dr. Hardy officially retired in 1981 but continued to publish research papers well into her 80s.

- Washington Post