On April 26, 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant exploded, causing a fire to erupt and releasing massive amounts of radioactive material. It remains one of the worst nuclear disasters in human history and its effects are still being studied by scientists today.
As a biologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1980 until her retirement in 2005, Dr. Irene Jones (PhD,’72, Cell and Molecular Biology) investigated the effects of such hazards on humans. Before her studies of humans, Jones and her team at Livermore developed a model system in mice to better understand what occurred in individuals exposed to radiation and genotoxic chemicals. They tested thymus-derived lymphocytes for the frequency and nature of genetic changes in the hprt gene — one that helps recycle unusable DNA and RNA.
The Chernobyl accident provided an opportunity for Livermore to determine how well their tests worked on humans. For that the team needed data. However, information about the clean-up workers, each of whom had been assigned a task that limited their exposure and their physical radiation dose was housed in a Russian database.
After one of her senior colleagues developed a research partnership with a scientist in Moscow, Dr. Jones made several trips to Russia to stress the importance of the collaboration and work out shipping the blood samples to Livermore. By the study’s end, scientists from both countries better understood the accuracy of dosages, cleanup management, test efficacy, and together laid the groundwork for future studies on radiation exposure.
As Jones recalls, “the Russians were excellent partners as well as hosts for these visits despite it being a challenging time politically. A picnic at the dacha (country house) was especially memorable.”
After spending most of her career as a Senior Staff Scientist in Livermore, Jones decided to extend her appreciation to the institution which laid the base for her scientific journey, first in teaching and then in research.
In July 2025, she established the Irene M. Jones Graduate Fellowship Fund in Molecular & Cellular Biology to support PhD students. As a former graduate researcher, Jones knows firsthand how financial aid provides students with flexibility.
“Establishing the fund was a very natural thing. I’m following the examples of my sister, mother, and father,” Jones said. “They all have funds at Illinois to support education in their fields of interest. And it just occurred to me, well, ‘Why not have the complete set?’”
Scientific prowess is inherent to the Jones family. Her sister Lorella was a faculty member in the Illinois Department of Physics. Their mother, a PhD astronomer, taught undergrads at multiple colleges. Her father, who held a PhD in physics, worked as a scientist and manager at the American Optical Company.
Before she became the fourth PhD in her family, Jones was just a student with a love for science. At the University of Rochester, she majored in biology and chemistry. She sought any research opportunity she could find, even if it meant working with squirrel monkeys. “They have very sharp teeth,” she said.
After graduating from Rochester, Jones applied to multiple doctoral programs. “I wanted to go to whichever one gave me the most latitude, which was Illinois.”
Early on, Jones joined the lab of Dr. Eli Reichmann in the Department of Botany — now Plant Biology — where she studied the Tobacco Necrosis Virus (TNV) and its Satellite virus (STNV). A satellite virus needs another virus, in this case the TNV, to infect a host cell for it to successfully replicate.
“I’d start out with small tobacco plants that just had a few leaves on them, so they were very tender,” Jones said. “And then I’d grind up leaves from plants that had been infected with the virus and rub it on the healthy plants. You had to damage the cell walls in order to get the viruses in. Some plants got only TNV, while others in a separate greenhouse got both TNV and STNV.”
After harvesting the leaves, Jones could compare which virus proteins were made. STNV turned out to be a perfect parasite. It used the proteins of TNV to replicate but apparently its one and only protein, the STNV coat protein, suppressed the synthesis of TNV coat protein, limiting how many infectious TNV virions were made.
“That work was all a combination of brute force and a lot of tedium,” Jones said. “That’s why they call it re-search. You search over and over again for what you’re trying to find.”
After graduation, in 1972, Jones accepted a position on the biology faculty at Grinnell College. Teaching labs was the best part of the job.
“It was more important to me that, in lab, the students learn how to do science than them getting the right answer,” she said. “Occasionally a student would ask to do something different and I would say, ‘Well, go and write up a proposal.’”
Jones received more than just research proposals: she met her husband Paul Schaich at Grinnell, where he was also on faculty. After Paul changed careers and got a new job in California, the couple packed their bags for Livermore.
“In its early days, the Department of Energy was committed to understanding the effects of radiation from atomic bombs,” Jones said. “For biologists at Livermore, this centered on developing and applying tests to measure the genetic effects in those exposed and their children.” The United States would have to wait over six years after the Chernobyl disaster to access the physical dosimetry for clean-up workers. But, according to Jones, “the nice thing” about measuring radiation is that physical dosimetry is well established. It takes three variables into account: the radiation’s intensity, how close someone was to the source, and how long they were exposed.
“All the people working at Chernobyl were assigned to their jobs knowing how much exposure they would get,” Jones said. “They were limited in the exposure they got before they were sent home. If it was high exposure, they had a very short shift; if it was low exposure, a longer time.
“In a sense we did three things: first, we got the experimental result which was that there was a very good job done in controlling how much dose people got. We learned the relative utility of the tests we used for future studies of radiation exposure. And third, reassuring the Russian people — the workers sent to clean up afterwards and their families — was also very important.”
Jones’ Chernobyl research informed her later research at Livermore, including her studies on other populations, all Americans.
“The study of DNA sequence changes in people revealed what parts of the hprt gene were critical and what types of genetic changes were induced by normal life processes and lifestyle choices such as smoking, “Jones said. “In the years since my retirement, I’ve been impressed at how quickly knowledge in these fields is advancing.”
Jones retired from the Livermore Lab in 2005 and still lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. When she’s not making a difference in the lives of School of MCB graduate students, the only radiation Dr. Irene Jones tracks today is how much California sun she gets while gardening, watching birds, and hiking the nearby hills.