This book stayed with me throughout my formal education, as it showed how searching scientific study could be conducted on the most ordinary parts of life. Having had a truly outstanding experience in what would later become the honors college at the University of Pittsburgh, I finished high school with enough credits to be nearly a junior at Pitt. I took graduate seminars on Weber -- where his writing on "objectivity" in science resonated powerfully against Stalininst science -- as an undergrad, and ended up with an undergraduate bachelor of science degree at the University of Pittsburgh and a Masters in Sociology in 1967.

As a late life aging jock, I found Steinem's essay on the strongest woman in the world a terrific expression of how modern society had kept women from finding or even flexing our muscles. Steinem nailed it perfectly. We grew up steeped in a culture where being healthy and strong was not valued for women, but being chosen to be a drum majorette because of what we looked like was. Today's cheerleaders are, in fact, athletes, but back then, it was believed that girls had to keep from getting too excited. Actually, when I was a teenager I was somewhat heftier than I am now and a bit of a tomboy, and never seriously had the option of appearing waiflike. I could hold my own in touch football. I even captained the basketball team in Donora Junior High. But, we were not allowed to run cross the entire court, lest we wear ourselves out from overexertion. Encouraged by one doctor who thought my face would be better noticed if my body were slimmed down, I once fasted for two weeks on only on water and diet pills -- given out like candy when they were first invented. I did not at all like what the pills did to my brain, so like millions of women of my generation I rapidly ballooned right back up. Others stuck with those pills and have the bodies and brains to show for it.

When Angier's book came out, I was steeped in biochemistry, immunology and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, and I remember being shocked that anyone could speak of such matters so clearly. I guess I secretly thought then that maybe one day I would try to do so. My interests in how we know what we say we know are unending. I once spent an entire year studying the philosophy of physics, specifically the "reality" of elementary particles, at the University of Chicago, where I completed my Ph.D. thanks to the good graces of a Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship. The class of "fellows" to which I belonged was one of the first to include women, and we were told clearly that it was up to us to show whether we could perform up to standards.

Chicago was like an intellectual candy store. I took classes in disciplines ranging from experimental and methodological issues to a number of inspiring ones in the Divinity School. Chicago provided a tremendously exciting venue, where teaching was vibrant, though women professors were nearly nonexistent. There was no escaping the moral debates about the war in Viet Nam. Living in Hyde Park on the South Side, there was also no escaping a profound recognition that our country had taken segregation out of laws but had not taken it out of our cities. The day Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was out walking through burning neighborhoods and got a haircut in a black beauty parlor, then as now a major institution in that community. With Beverly Jackson, a single mother of two, and Stan Lubarski, a lapsing Jesuit priest, I shortly afterwards ended up briefly at Virginia Union University, an historically black college, in a young and enthusiastic effort to somehow atone for the sins of the fathers.

In my doctoral research at Chicago, I continued to try to understand how fundamentally different epistemic communities conferred meaning on their realities of religion and those of science. My Ph.D. thesis, in the Committee on the History of Culture, contrasted these two domains with which I have been fascinated since I can remember thinking. I actually became a scientist -- toxicologist and epidemiologist -- via three different post-doctoral stints.

"What if Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.

She fixed him with a long, careful, searching stare that was not devoid of irony's intelligent sparkle.

"The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. But let a third party enter the game -- a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, "Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars" -- and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical."

If all these men had all been tired and full of flu, but with normal skin tone, no one would have thought to connect their problems. Only their exceptional color made the local doctors ask what was going on. Normal skin is rosy because it contains iron in the form of hemoglobin. Blood that is saturated with oxygen is bright red. Blood that has lost its oxygen is dark bluish-red. Carbon monoxide and other compounds, like those containing cyanide or nitrogen, can block iron from entering hemoglobin and deplete blood of oxygen. People who lack oxygen in their blood tend to look blue.

In New York, The health department officials learned that every one of these blue men had become sick within a half-hour of eating at a local diner. Ten of them had had oatmeal, rolls and coffee; one had eaten just oatmeal. Attention turned to what on earth was in that oatmeal. One of the saltshakers used in preparing the cereal, it turned out, had been mistakenly filled with white crystals that looked just like sodium chloride but were actually sodium nitrite. Sodium nitrite tastes salty because it contains sodium, just as salt does, but it also contains nitrites, consisting of nitrogen bound to oxygen. Nitrites can wreak havoc in the blood. When bound to nitrite, hemoglobin cannot absorb iron and takes on an abnormal blue color, a condition called methemoglobinemia. Once this puzzle was solved, both the saltshaker and the men returned to normal.

The story of the eleven blue men provides a spectacular example of what the work of epidemiology -- the word comes from the Greek epi, upon, and demos, people -- is largely about. Epidemiologists look for common connections of patterns of illness among groups of people. That work is easiest when exposures are knowable or controlled, and take place over relatively short periods. Thus the challenge of the blue men was straightforward. They got sick quickly. They did not die. Therefore, they could be asked about what had happened to them in the days before they became ill. In fact about 125 people ate the same oatmeal, but only these eleven turned blue and sick. The blue guys all happened to be heavy drinkers and had added extra salt to their cereal, in an effort to make up for the sodium deficit common to alcoholics.

All of us have faced different sorts of Catch 22, with varying degrees of humor. In my own lifework, at several points when I have previously considered stepping outside science into writing for the general public, I have been told by some whom I respect greatly, "Serious scientists do not write for the public. That is for journalists." The message has been a Catch 22. If you do write a book on science for the public, don't make it too understandable, else you will no longer be a member of the tribe of serious scientists. We'll see.

I remember as an honors undergraduate at Pitt being in a graduate seminar in anthropological theory, with George Peter Murdock, then at Pitt, formerly the master of the field at Yale. He railed on about how Margaret Mead was not a serious researcher because she wrote for "women's magazines!" Immediately I was drawn to Mead's work and learned that she had published even more technical articles in anthropology than Murdock at the time. What steamed her mostly male colleagues was that she insisted on telling the public what her studies on sex and violence in more primitive cultures meant for ordinary people. And she did this pretty graphically and candidly at a time when polite people did not cotton much to such matters being talked about in public. I actually constructed a graph of the happy Meadian, where I showed that once her annual rate of popular articles exceed that of her scientific articles, her standing within science fell, as her popularity in the general public rose.

Favorite films?

• Forget Paris
• Les Infants Du Paradis
• Great White Hope
• Rashimon
• Knife in the Water
• Soylent Green
• Tootsie
• Punch Me in the Stomach
• Philadelphia
• Dead Man Walking
• The War of the Roses
• Shakespeare in Love
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• Some Like it Hot
• A Thousand Clowns
• Thelma & Louise

• Bach, Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello
• Brahms, Cello Sonata in A
• Bruch, Kol Nidre
• Beethoven, Opus 111
• Stravinsky, Les Rites des Printemps
• A cappella religious music of all sorts, Hebrew, Gregorian and Buddhists chants
• Betty
• The Rolling Stones
• James Taylor
• Phil Lehrer
• Odetta
• Jefferson Airplane
• Opera: Salome; Madame Butterfly

If you had a book club, what would it be reading -- and why?
David McCullough's John Adams, because it is tells the story of an unsung and inspiring American political figure, captures marvelously textured history and exposes the human frailties, piercing self-understanding and magnificent relationship of John and Abigail Adams. It deserves to be talked about carefully and slowly.

Who are your favorite writers, and what makes their writing special?

A number of accomplished environmental journalists have set the mold for penetrating analyses, and while I do not always agree with them, I always find their writing top notch: Phil Shabekoff, Keith Schneider, Gregg Easterbrook, Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle, Rick Weiss, Joby Warrick, and Don Hopey.

What are you working on now?

• The Secret History of the War on Cancer
• Oral History of Donora and Environs
• Recipes for Living Better and Longer
• Private Poems

What else do you want your readers to know?
Yoga and a number of other forms of physical activity keep me centered on the earth, as does my family and good friends. Skiing and hiking keep me nearer to G-d. Study of Torah and attending Havera when I can and studying other ancient texts reminds me why I am here.

I am blessed with many friends who are struggling with serious health issues. This keeps us all focused on the present. One motto: There is no present, like the time.

I wish I could speak Chinese.

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In the summer of 2004, we asked authors featured in Meet the Writers to give us a list of their all-time favorite summer reads, and tell us what makes them just right for the season. Here's what Devra Davis had to say:

These two books provide chilling accounts of how years of willful neglect resulted in one of the worst environmental tragedies in modern times -- the poisoning of the town of Libby, Montana. A parable for the developing world, through simple stories of the men and women who worked the asbestos plants and mines, they chart the tragic human price paid by those who went to work everyday, never imagining that the dust on their clothing would shorten their lives and that of their families.