On an early spring day in New York City, a clean wind from the north sweeps down the Hudson River. Cars are backed up on the George Washington Bridge, their tailpipes spewing, yet the air today seems to brush the pollution away. It is so clear I can make out every fissure in the rust-colored cliffs of the Palisades across the river in New Jersey. What a terrific view Frederica (Ricky) Perera has from her 25th-floor office.
However clear the day, the view is deceiving. For 25 years the 64-year-old professor of environmental health sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health has been probing the long-term, invisible impacts of air pollution on health. An award-winning cancer investigator and defender of the welfare of newborn children, Perera comes from the public-health model of disease, which assumes that most ailments are conveyed from outside the body and can be prevented. She has pioneered a field called molecular epidemiology, a hybrid science that melds urban surveys with subtle molecular changes. Her work ranges from the noxious tailpipe to the precancerous cell, evaluating all the possible way stations of disease. It is an extremely complicated task because it is so broad. Progress in molecular epidemiology has been slow, but Perera is not one who gets discouraged.
Just blocks from her base at the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health are the low-income neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Harlem. The poor there tend to live with more pollution than other people do. Some is of their own making, like cigarette smoke, but a lot of it they cannot avoid, like lead in old paint and smoggy urban air. The predominantly African American and Dominican subjects of her research live a world apart from Ricky Perera, yet she thinks about their health all the time.
Since it began in 1998, her Mothers and Newborns Study has enrolled 700 women. The project monitors women's exposures to airborne chemicals during pregnancies and tests their babies as soon as they are born. Tracking particles of pollution that pass from mother to child, Perera and her team have connected the process to lower birth weights and smaller head circumferences in some infants. She suspects cancer could be an outcome as well, although it's too early in the study to know for certain.
Perera has agreed to take me to a clinic where participants in her studies are recruited. Wearing black slacks and pale makeup, she puts on a black leather jacket and a black leather backpack. Thin and athletic, she walks at a rapid clip down 168th Street. When we get to the Audubon Clinic, which serves low-income patients and is supported by the university, we sit in the corner of the waiting room, trying to be unobtrusive. Perera's eyes flick about for pregnant women.
