Physicist Douglas Jones aided cancer treatment

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Douglas Jones was so important to providing cancer treatments at Virginia Mason Medical Center that the radiation-oncology section was closed yesterday in honor of the contributions he had made to patients.

Mr. Jones, 61, died July 5 after suffering a heart attack.

"He was just an amazing man," said Mary Rouzer, who worked with Mr. Jones for 20 years at Lynnwood's Northwest Medical Physics Center, which he founded. "His brain never stopped. He was the kindest man you ever met."

A physicist, Mr. Jones was a person "who didn't want to make bombs" and instead turned his energies into improving the lives of patients throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Many of those contributions involved his work as the sole physicist at Virginia Mason.

Mr. Jones was born March 5, 1940, in Britain and in 1965 worked in Rochester, England, as a medical physicist. He supervised a research project involving thermo-luminescent dosimetry, a form of cancer treatment, and was invited to Boston to share his research.

That presentation was so successful that it led to his move to the United States, first for a brief time in California, and in 1969 to the Lake Stevens area of Snohomish County.

In 1980, he founded and directed the Northwest Medical Physics Center, which now employs 14 physicists and provides medical-physics consulting services to hospitals from Alaska to Oregon.

Mr. Jones was the author of countless publications in medical journals and was a fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine and the American College of Radiology.

His work was crucial in determining and aiding in the proper treatment of cancer patients, said Rouzer, but Mr. Jones' research also took other forms. This year, his research was cited as being instrumental in allowing substantial improvements to be made in the design of the radiation shielding for the Cancer Care Alliance clinic at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Using normal techniques, shielding for a linear-accelerator vault there would have required walls 9 feet thick, but Mr. Jones was able to calculate a way to provide the shielding with walls of heavyweight concrete just 44 inches thick, with an additional 4 inches of normal concrete.

That allowed the clinic to gain 2,000 square feet of valuable treatment space.

Mr. Jones is survived by his wife of 39 years, Ann; two children, Julie and Andrew; and four grandchildren. A memorial service was held yesterday at the Snohomish Presbyterian Church.