Spider Man

"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."

His changing feelings began to cement after a car wreck in August 2003. His new gray Saturn sat idly at the busy intersection of Iowa and Orchard streets in Lawrence, waiting for someone to turn. A car approached from behind and rear-ended Sandidge. The impact caused severe whiplash and momentary paralysis. "I was pretty messed up. The car was pretty messed up," he says. He spent the night in the hospital, but going home didn't solve problems he would soon encounter.

"I lost my [teaching] job because I couldn't walk without pain, causing me to lose my house because I had no money," he says. "I had to leave school for six months, which set me back a semester and a half. I lost part of my research work." He sued the driver, but the defendant's attorney pointed out that Sandidge had a prior neck injury from his football days, significantly lowering his reward. "I didn't get one-fourth of what I was out [because of the injury]," he says. "I'm still paying off credit-card bills from then." Instead of appealing the ruling, he moved on. "I didn't have time to waste. I had to do research."