Jim Martin’s life embodies the American dream. Born during the Depression to poor factory workers, he grew up in a Tennessee cabin with no plumbing or electricity. He was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, and ended up going to junior college almost on a whim. But by the time he was in his twenties, he had a degree in physics and was monitoring atomic tests for the U.S. government.
The emeritus environmental health sciences professor has led a career spanning some of the modern age’s most tumultuous discoveries, and one that has followed all the twists and turns of nuclear energy in public policy and practice. Martin served 25 years with the U.S. Public Health Service and the Environmental Protection Agency, first monitoring the environmental impact of nuclear weapons and nuclear facilities, then developing standards for radiation waste management and safety. In 1982 he moved to academia, joining the EHS faculty to build a solid graduate training program in radiological health. His manual Physics for Radiation Protection remains the leading current text on radiation safety and is used around the country. Now retired, he continues to work as a consultant in radioactivity measurement.
Cheerful and unpretentious, Martin describes his life as a series of serendipitous events. He was born in Georgia. When he was eight or nine, his father bought a hardscrabble chunk of farmland and moved the family to the tiny community of Poplin’s Cross Roads outside Shelbyville, Tennessee.
“It was probably a saving grace for me,” Martin says. “We knew everybody, and everybody knew us. It was comfortable, there was a security, even though it was
a very hard life.”
Martin claims he never thought of going to college. A friend introduced Martin to the dean of the local junior college, who encouraged Martin to enroll. “I almost forgot about it. But I mentioned it to my dad, and he said, ‘We’ll find a way to do it.’” Then one day, Martin recalls, a car pulled up to his house and the junior college dean got out. “He said, ‘Give me five dollars.’ I didn’t know what to do, so I gave him the five dollars, and he said, ‘Okay, we’ve signed you up; see you in September.’ Then September came and I said, ‘Well, he’s got my five dollars; I better go.’ It was really that way.”
Martin describes finding his vocation in the same terms, as a happy accident. “A friend at school said, ‘Jimmy, you’ve got to take physics with me.’ I said, ‘What’s physics?’ He said, ‘It’s how things work. I’m the only one who’s signed up for the class and they won’t teach it for just one student.’”
Martin went on to Vanderbilt University, earning his BA in physics in 1956. On a fellowship from the Atomic Energy Commission, he went to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for some graduate-level courses and then took a job with the U.S. Public Health Service. “Within three weeks, I was looking at nuclear clouds in Nevada.” A few months later, Martin was in the South Pacific measuring radiation levels in the environment, food, and water pathways after nuclear weapons tests.
The U.S. halted atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the early 1960s, and Martin’s focus shifted to nuclear power plants. With another grant from the AEG, he earned his PhD in physics from UM in 1965. Through the PHS he conducted numerous environmental studies on radiation safety. Between 1979 and 1982 he worked with the Colorado State Health Department to create a hazardous waste program. He found himself navigating the legislative bureaucracy and taking on powerful interests such as the Coors Company and state representative Anne Gorsuch, who became Ronald Reagan’s controversial EPA director in 1981. Martin persisted in the face of considerable opposition to establish the state’s first hazardous waste disposal site.
At the end of that assignment, an old friend, UM EHS professor Arnold Jacobson, asked Martin if he might be interested in coming to SPH. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve done just about everything else—I may as well try it!’” Martin recalls. “It was one of the better moves I ever made, although going through the tenure process nearly killed me.” As a professor, he passed on his expertise in radiation measurement and safety to a new generation of students. Many graduates of the program now serve in prominent state and federal positions. With his colleagues Martin developed new techniques for radiological assessment and measurement, applicable in areas from nuclear power plants to medical technology. One of the highlights of his career, he recalls, was being tapped by former NRC chair John Ahearne to serve as the radiation safety expert on a committee that reviewed U.S. nuclear facilities following the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.
But as nuclear power fell out of favor in the last decades of the 20th century, funds for radiation research dwindled. Along with numerous other schools, SPH discontinued the radiology program after Martin retired in 2002.
There are signs the pendulum may be swinging back. President Barack Obama has hinted that nuclear power may be a viable option for America’s energy needs in future. “The private sector is very busy filing applications anticipating the return of nuclear power,” says EHS Chair Howard Hu. “Right now there’s just a bit of a buzz and everyone’s waiting to see what happens.”
Martin thinks that Americans may embrace nuclear power again. Modern designs for nuclear power plants are far more efficient and safer than the first-generation plants built in the 1960s, and when radiation workers are properly trained, he says, nuclear technology is no more a threat to public health than any other industry. “I think we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve learned it the hard way,” he says. “But the training today is very, very rigorous.”
Now enjoying his retirement, Martin is considering writing a memoir. “I think I would call it ‘The Path Taken,’” he says. “That country background gave me the basics, and it all followed from there.”