Is there a way to use a column header in a database as a variable in Python?

I'll preface this saying I'm pretty new to python.

I have a database and need to access it using Python and SQLite. That's the easy part. I have created the table and column names etc, such as:

c.execute("CREATE TABLE Tanks \
(ID INT PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,\
...
DIR_Radius INT NOT NULL,\
DIR_Dish1 INT NOT NULL,\
DIR_Dish2 INT NOT NULL,\
DIR_Length INT NOT NULL,\

And so on. So what I want to do is use the column header as a variable, i.e.

Dish1 = 'DIR_Dish1'

But as you may know in python that just assigns the string value to the variable name.

Saying

Dir_Dish1 > 0.001

Doesn't work either

def Dish_Vol():
if (Dish > 0.0001):
    int1 = math.pi * Dish,
    ...

I am trying to check that the value in the comlumn DIR_Dish1 has a integer value greater than 0.001, so that I can go ahead and perform some calculation. How do I go about using a variable as such?