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Spider Man

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One academic, an entomologist who is familiar with Sandidge's work but requested anonymity to avoid angering his former colleague, cautions that Sandidge's work can't be considered conclusive until there's more research. "He infers from his laboratory experiments that spraying insecticide will increase brown-recluse population in homes. But no one has done any critical, real-world experiments to prove this actually happens. His notions are controversial. He might be right and will change how brown-recluse pest control is done. But he also might be wrong. The body of research on the subject is insufficient."

"It's not rocket science," Sandidge counters. If he notices that a certain population isn't reacting to the dusting mixture, he simply adjusts. "But that's the part of the equation that most people don't understand."

Here's how it started. One day when Sandidge was in elementary school, he took a black widow to class in a glass jar.

"I remember the librarian took it from me and said I couldn't have it in school. I really didn't know why. I understood it was poisonous, but I didn't really know anything about it."

Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Madison Heights, Virginia, across the James River from Lynchburg, Sandidge says he was a nerdy kid. "I was into robotics and stuff. I got good grades but never had to try too hard at it."

He describes his family — father, mother, two older siblings, himself — as middle class. "It was a smallish town ... we had a creek and woods behind our house."

He always harassed the local bug population but never really knew why.

The incident with the black widow and the librarian triggered his curiosity; he claims to have checked out every book about spiders from every library in the area.

Less nerdy by the time he got to high school, he ran track and played football. "I still have records for the shot put and discus," he says. "I was always breaking my own records. I always did things technically perfect because I wasn't a big guy." He says he had offers to play football at a handful of Division II colleges, but his focus wasn't on sports. His straight-A grade-point average, multiple college credits and presidency of the local Vocational Industrial Club of America — "I've been president of over 20 clubs in my life," he says — propelled him toward academia.

He started at Virginia Tech as an engineering major, but his hatred for the subject and general misery nearly caused him to quit school.

"When you go to college, everybody tells you what you should do because it might make a lot of money, not to do what you're good at or what you like." One day, he was browsing a handout that detailed the various research projects going on at the school, and he noted the spider studies of Brent Opell, a biology professor at Virginia Tech. He went to visit Opell, and after a four-hour discussion with the professor, he became a worker in Opell's lab and switched his major to molecular biology.

"Jamel was kind of quiet at first," Opell recalls. "If you've talked with him, you might not believe that now."

Opell recognized his student's potential and put Sandidge on a project involving the relationship between the spider cerebellum and the capture thread it makes. "He did take on things that no one had looked into," Opell says. "Brown recluses have been around for so long, and people have been aware of their problems and biology, but it's surprising how much he found out about their relationships and dispersal — a lot of basic biological questions you might have thought people had figured out years ago."

Sandidge's interest in spiders' dispersal, population characteristics, genetic structure and social behavior led him to KU for a master's degree. "I wanted to combine my degree in molecular biology with spiders," he says.

One of the only scientists doing this kind of research was Deborah Smith, an entomology professor at KU. When he realized that few people knew about brown-recluse populations in Kansas — and as he started to believe that everything published on the matter so far was "extremely repetitious" — he decided to stay in Lawrence for his doctorate.

Smith, who became Sandidge's adviser at KU, says his study of brown recluses in urban environments, an area previously untapped by researchers, was groundbreaking. "It's almost a mystery to me why it wasn't done before," she says. "The idea that they have strong scavenging habits was novel. No one had done that."

The significance of that idea, she says, was that the sedentary brown recluse might not actively search for a supply of live insects. Therefore, spraying chemicals — which only work when an organism comes in contact with them — isn't necessary unless it's a heavy saturation. "So then you have to make a decision," she says. "Do you want persistent toxic chemicals or spiders running around?"

Smith describes Sandidge as outgoing and charismatic. "He's quite the showman. I think in another life, he could've been a Baptist preacher." For proof, she recalls the time she took Sandidge to an international spider conference in South Africa. "People are usually pretty formal at these things," she says. "But he was striding across the stage telling them that he knew this spider. They took notice."

Sandidge never set out to fill in the gaps in brown-recluse research.

"It was all laboratory observation, not what they do in their natural habitat or what they do in houses or how they react to human contact," he says. "[It was] all this random, let's-put-it-in-a-vial-and-see-what-it-does kind of stuff."

As far as he was concerned, it was up to him to set the record straight.

His plan was to teach, but he began to realize that his research was more important to him than doing the university's bidding. Killing himself to reach university requirements — such as having a paper published in a science journal — didn't appeal to him anymore.

"The scientific community looks down on you if you work with the public," he says. "I want my own lab. They won't support you. There's not a system in place for it unless it involved whatever machine or grad student they're pushing at the moment. So you're kind of on your own."

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