“Some have greatness thrust upon ’em,” Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night. Others have greatness thrust two flights up. I was in the latter group.
The office of Kirk R. Smith, Ph.D.—professor of global environmental health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and a member of our editorial board—was just a couple of floors above mine. Maybe you read one of the many obituaries about him in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or other major media outlets around the nation, and the world, when he died in June 2020 at age 73 from a stroke and subsequent cardiac arrest. A Nobel laureate, Kirk studied what he had come to find was one of the most pressing global health issues: household air pollution created by the burning of solid fuels in inefficient cookstoves used in 40 percent of the world’s homes. It’s a threat to the well-being of more than 2 billion people, mostly in developing countries.
The solid fuels used in cooking include wood, charcoal, coal, and dung (dried animal manure). The fine particulate matter (soot) they emit in household smoke results in an estimated 4 million deaths a year, according to the World Health Organization, with poor women and children in rural areas most affected. Much of Kirk’s life’s work was devoted to finding solutions. Among them, he introduced cleaner fuels and better household ventilation in remote parts of the globe, including in Asia and Latin America. And he helped develop low-cost sensors to monitor indoor air pollution in economically marginalized countries.
Kirk brought to light, too, that once indoor air pollution leaves the house, it is an important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and thus climate change. He was, in fact, one of the first scientists to sound the warning about our changing climate and its dire consequences.
I was very lucky to have a little piece of Kirk to myself in his capacity on our editorial board, and to come to know personally this modest, soft-spoken, thoughtful man. I first met him more than 20 years ago. I was just coming on as chair of the editorial board and was called to a meeting to discuss an article for the Wellness Letter about nutritional supplements. A giant in the field of biochemistry was arguing that we should promote certain vitamin pills, and Kirk calmly and methodically explained why the researcher’s reasoning was misguided—he simply did not have the data to support his claims. There was no posturing or one-upmanship.
Over the years, whenever I struggled with how to assess an issue, I could always depend on Kirk to offer a pristine scientific opinion without bias. I would just run up the two flights of stairs to his office to bounce something off him, and he would listen carefully before giving his thoughts. I am sad that we have lost him and also sad about a missed opportunity to have been friends with him even longer: It turns out, as I learned recently, that we were undergraduates at the same time at UC Berkeley more than 50 years ago. Our paths didn’t cross back then, but how wonderful it would have been to have known this man of vision and purpose before he became the global force that he did.
