Liane Russell dies at 95
Liane Russell, a refugee of Nazi Europe who became one of the most distinguished female scientists of her era, building a colony of more than 200,000 laboratory mice that she used to demonstrate the importance of protecting developing embryos from X-rays and other forms of radiation, died July 20 at a hospital in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She was 95.
She had contracted pneumonia after undergoing chemotherapy treatment for lung cancer, said her son, David “Ace” Russell.
Dr. Russell spent the early years of her life in Vienna, where her father was a chemical engineer and her mother was a voice teacher. Her parents, according to a family tribute, cultivated her “inquiring mind, treated her as a rational being, and convinced her that girls could do anything boys could.”
Russell's family, which was of Jewish heritage, managed to escape Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938, but only by relinquishing their home, her father's company and their belongings. They ultimately settled in the United States, where Russell pursued her scientific studies and career.
In 1947, she and her husband, fellow scientist William Russell, joined what became the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Both had doctorates in zoology and specialized in genetics. Together they built the “Mouse House,” as their colony of laboratory mice was known, with the goal of using mice to better understand the effect of radiation on living things and particularly mammals.
It was a matter of pressing concern at the time: Two years earlier, the United States had ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs — produced through the Manhattan Project conducted at Oak Ridge — on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the onset of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear war loomed, and along with it fears about the health effects of nuclear fallout.
Russell's research produced findings with relevance far beyond such cataclysmic eventualities. She became known chiefly for her research showing that radiation, such as from X-rays, harms embryos, particularly in their early stages of development. Because of her work — as any female patient who has ever sat in a dentist's chair can attest — women of childbearing age are routinely asked if they are or might be pregnant before they are X-rayed.