Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
PORTRAIT OF INNOVATION: DEVRA LEE DAVIS
MARTHA DAVIDSON
The sooty gray skies and coal-paved alleys of Donora, Pennsylvania, are
among the earliest memories of Devra Lee Davis, a leading epidemiologist
and former director of the Program in Health, Environment and Develop-
ment at the World Resources Institute in Washington. But the path from
Donora (a steel- and zinc-mill town that was the site of the first “killer
smog” in the United States) to Davis's pioneering studies of environmental
risk factors for cancer and other chronic diseases was not a direct one.
Davis was born in 1946, when her parents were stationed at a military
base in Virginia, but most of her childhood was spent in Donora, south of
Pittsburgh in the Monongahela Valley, where her grandparents had settled
when they emigrated from Eastern Europe. Her grandfather earned a liv-
ing by scavenging and reselling good bits of steel from the slag heaps of the
mills. Her father, after working as a chemist and machinist in the mills and
serving in the Army, expanded the family business to resales of office and
industrial equipment. Feeling that, as Jews, they owed a debt to the United
States for defeating Hitler, her father remained an officer in the Army
Reserve for 30 years. During the Korean War he was called up as a drill ser-
geant, and the family lived for a while at Army bases in Indiana and Texas.
With hindsight, Davis is glad that at least a few of her early years were spent
away from the polluted air of Donora.
As a child, however, she took Donora's gray skies, dazzling sunsets, and
sulfuric air for granted. She and her three siblings had fun sliding down the
town's slippery, barren hills. Nor did she find her grandmother Pearl's heart
disease at all unusual.“I only realized that not all blue-haired grandmothers
stayed in bed tethered to oxygen tanks when I met someone else's granny
who actually walked around,” she recalls. Many years later, all of Pearl's five
children, including Devra's mother, developed heart problems.
