CU scientist Dr. Jim Ruttenber
Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News
Published June 22, 2007 at midnight
Dr. Jim Ruttenber of the University of Colorado, one of the nation's top scientists on the effect of radioactivity on health and the environment, died in a riptide accident off a Mexican beach Saturday.
Dr. Ruttenber's death at 59 shocked a group of friends who ranged from top scientists to environmental activists to sick workers from the now-demolished Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant outside Denver.
He died just after a trip to Indonesia to study the dangerous H5N1 avian flu virus. He was home only one day before leaving for Mexico's University of Colima to set up a medical school exchange program with CU.
"He loved life. He loved the outdoors. We loved each other incredibly," said his wife, Margaret, a fellow scientist who met him during a health study at Rocky Flats. "On Memorial Day, we were canoeing at Gross Reservoir," one of many days they spent skiing, biking and otherwise enjoying the natural environment he tried passionately to protect.
He earned an M.D., specializing in epidemiology, and a doctorate in human ecology, both from Emory University in Atlanta. After 10 years at the Centers for Disease Control there, he moved to Colorado. He became a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver as well as a professor of environmental science in Boulder, where he lived.
"He is the leading person in understanding occupational radiation exposure," said Dr. John Hokanson, head of CU's epidemiology and community health department. Though CU is trying to continue Dr. Ruttenber's research, Hokanson said, "There is no one like him."
Dr. Ruttenber is best known for his work on a state health department study of 16,000 Rocky Flats workers. It found that those exposed to plutonium had higher death rates from cancer of the lung, brain, stomach, rectum and soft tissue, as well as certain anemias and tumors of the nervous system.
Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research in Maryland was Dr. Ruttenber's co-author on a chapter of Nuclear Wasteland, a book about the effects of nuclear weapons production, which Makhijani said was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He said Dr. Ruttenber was a straight-shooting scientist. "If the risk was low, he would say the risk was low," and vice versa. "He was still looking for an answer to all the brain cancers at Rocky Flats."
Dr. Ruttenber championed people like Charlie Wolf, a Rocky Flats engineer with brain cancer, by testifying in Wolf's successful appeal to win federal compensation for his illness.
"He was always trying to help people," Wolf said.
Len Ackland, a CU professor of environmental journalism who was Dr. Ruttenber's co-teacher for a graduate seminar on "The Nuclear West," described his colleague as joyful and humorous. He also was towering at 6-foot-5.
"He was a fount of knowledge, and willing to teach it," Ackland said. And that knowledge was detailed and broad, ranging from uranium miners in western Colorado to villagers suffering from a mercury spill at a gold mine in Peru, Ackland said.
Dr. Ruttenber is survived by his wife; two daughters, Annie, a senior at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, and Marya, who just graduated from Fairview High School and will attend CU in the fall; two stepchildren, Minica and Nicholas Schonbeck; and a brother, Jeffrey, of Ocala, Fla.
A service will be held at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, 1600 Grant St., but no date has been set. CU is setting up a memorial fund in his name to benefit environmental sciences at the University of Colima Medical School.
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