Davie was born on October 25, 1927, in Tacoma, Washington,[2] to Charles and Teckla Davie. He grew up in La Grande, Washington and attended Eatonville High School.[3] He received an undergraduate degree in 1950 from the University of Washington, where he had worked in the laboratory of biochemistry professor Donald Hanahan.[4] He completed a Ph.D. at UW in 1954.[5] During his doctoral studies, Davie worked with Hans Neurath to learn about protein structure and function.[4]
Davie has made significant research contributions to the understanding of coagulation. Davie and Ratnoff described the sequence of steps in the clotting cascade. Davie and Ratnoff published their clotting cascade model in 1964, around the same time that Robert Gwyn Macfarlane of the University of Oxford produced a similar model.[7] Davie cofounded a biotechnology company, ZymoGenetics, in 1981. The company was purchased by Novo Nordisk several years later; in 2000, ZymoGenetics was recreated as an independent company and it was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2010.[8]