The George Herbert Jones Laboratory is located at the northwest corner of the main quadrangle of the University of Chicago campus, between East 58th and 57th Streets.

It is a four-story masonry structure, built in 1928-29 as facility and instructional space for the university's staff of research chemists and graduate students in chemistry.

[2] As part of the U.S. War Department's Manhattan Project, University of Chicago chemists began to study the newly manufactured radioactive element, plutonium.

Room 405 was the site where, for the first time on August 18, 1942, a team led by physicist Glenn Seaborg isolated a trace quantity of this new element.

The U.S. Department of Energy remediated Jones Laboratory in the 1980s by studying and removing almost all of the building's World War II-era radioactive waste.