Entomologist's Bent For Bug Busting Develops Into Profitable Business

Gary Alpert strayed from his career track, but at Harvard he found he could still do good research as well as make good money BOSTON--When Gary Alpert arrived at Harvard 15 years ago as a graduate student, he was eager to pursue an academic career in insect behavior. Then the Pharaoh ant got in his way. Lots of them, actually. They were all over the place, running rampant through the biology labs and hallways and showing up in lunch bags and research preparations. Years earlier, the bugs had hitchhiked to Cambridge from tropical jungles, presumably stowed away in someone's luggage. They escaped, infesting the labs and thwarting all attempts to get rid of them. "It was an entomologist's nightmare come true," recalls Alpert. In desperation, he tried something unorthodox. Alpert borrowed an insect growth-regulating chemical from an endocrinology professor, and mixed it into peanut butter as bait. The ants carried the food back to their nests and fed it to their queens, who then became sterile. Soon they all were gone. Harvard was so pleased that when Alpert finished his doctorate in 1981, its administrators created a job for him as pest control officer. He took it, intending to stay on just a year while he looked for a faculty appointment. Instead, he got caught up in developing a new ethos about pest control. Alpert still longs for academic credibility, but his success in ridding Harvard and other prominent Boston institutions of pests--and pesticides--shows that there truly is more than one way to push back the frontiers of science. When he started Archos Inc. in 1981, Gary Alpert chose that name for his company because it is Greek for "leader." His goal was to lead industry away from its reliance on insecticide sprays. "I did it to show pesticide companies that it could work," he says. "I use things I learned in animal behavior class and apply them to insect control." More established pest control operators were skeptical of Alpert's approach, but within a year, Archos was profitable enough for Alpert to buy a new silver Porsche, obvious proof that even an idealistic scientist could excel by business' bottom line standard, he says. Now the company's six employees bring in about $500,000 a year, according to Alpert, its president, who says he spends about 10 hours a week running this operation. Archos found a receptive market in Boston institutions that wanted to limit the use of chemicals in their facilities. "I didn't like the idea of aerosols being sprayed with so many kids around," recalls Leroy Tinnin of Children's Hospital of Boston. So he decided to try Archos. Tinnin admits to having been apprehensive at first about this unorthodox approach, but now he swears by it. "We have seen a tremendous decrease in our pest problems," he says. Archos now has contracts with more than a dozen hospitals, biotechnology and computer companies, and research institutions in New England. In 1987, Alpert also set up an R&D company, Protos Corp. With support from the Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture, Protos has come out with improved survey traps for cockroaches and is developing a way to control carpenter ants using bait. Alpert's ideas have spread beyond even Archos' customers. He consults for Harvard's neighbor, MIT, as well as for the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service, teaching their staffs how to deal with pest problems in historic houses, museums, and office buildings. He was once flown into Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland to rid the officers' quarters of cockroaches. He also works with environmental groups like the Massachusetts Audubon Society, something other pest controllers tend to avoid because this industry often is attacked by these groups. In his work, Alpert has taken his knowledge and applied it in a low-key, friendly manner. "If you need any help, he's always there; not just for me, but also for the people who've bucked him [operators who disagree with Alpert's approach]," says Rod Kreimeyer, owner of Best Pest Control Services in Arlington, Mass. Alpert is as likely to be crawling around a greasy kitchen at midnight as lecturing a group of pest control operators or sitting in a suit on a pesticides board meeting trying to set standards for the industry. At the same time, Alpert is working in an industry bound by tradition and loath to adopt his practices. "Gary is not particularly liked by the pest control industry," says Rachel Freed, conservation administrator for the town of Wayland, Mass. "To them, he represents the green people. They are gunning for him." Some companies will deliberately try to underbid Archos, for example. Kreimeyer agrees: "The problem you have out there is that people just don't want to change." Yet those in the field say Alpert's no- or least-spray way is the wave of the future. "More and more people are becoming conscious about pesticides," says Kreimeyer. The state of Massachusetts is planning to limit pesticide use in its buildings and facilities. And the Lexington, Mass., school district recently issued a 25-page call for bids for integrated pest management approaches. "In this area here, it was greatly due to the type of work that's being done at Harvard," says Kreimeyer. "Harvard is a big institution; a lot of people look to Harvard as an example." --E.P. "I enjoyed the job so much and I just got busy doing a lot of things, so I stayed," he says. He was glad to have some time away from the never-ending pressures of research. But, in Alpert's case, his foray outside academia actually allowed him to pursue his scientific "dream" project--the study of ant diversity--and to work on conserving tropical forests. Had he been dependent on grants, he might have had trouble getting support for this arcane work. Instead he has used the profits from his own pest control business to finance several expeditions to Africa. He hopes that his work will rank him among his academic peers as a bona fide scientist. Not that he let his scientific training be wasted while on the bug-busting job. Alpert has used his insights into insect and animal behavior first to rid Harvard laboratories of the insidious Pharaoh ants and later to make the campus practically pest- and pesticide-free. He also started and runs two companies. One, called Archos Inc., offers pest control services. The other, Protos Corp., develops innovative alternatives to insecticides. In addition, he squeezes in teaching and consulting for other universities and agencies. Alpert's various activities have a common theme--to reduce dependence on chemical pesticides. In the Boston area, about 50 companies make about $75 million a year controlling pests, primarily through spraying. Alpert envisions a better, safer way. "He's pioneered urban integrated pest management in this area," says Rachel Freed, conservation administrator for Wayland, Mass. Four years ago Freed tapped Alpert to redesign pest control strategies at the Massachusetts Audubon Society. "He has a much broader picture of the problem," she says. "It's from his scientific training. It's made him very good at solving problems that no one can figure out." Alpert's interest in insect pests evolved slowly. He entered college in 1965 at Washington State University, as a psychology major, chalking up lots of experience running four-legged creatures through mazes. He didn't study insects until his senior year. Then a single entomology class opened up an exciting new world for him, and he threw himself into it with the same zeal that he would later apply to innovations in pest control. For one assignment to make an insect collection, he recalls "wrestling a hog down just so I could get a hog louse." And there were several other ventures into the wild in his quest for unusual specimens. He stayed on to earn a master's degree in entomology in 1972, then eventually headed for Harvard. Harvard hired Alpert to help develop alternative pest controls. "My first step was to ban organophosphate sprays," says Alpert. "I just felt we could live without them." The companies then being paid to rid Harvard of pests said that it couldn't be done, and even Alpert wasn't sure about the results. But today Harvard has fewer pests and, equally important to Alpert, no complaints about pesticides exposure. The Ivy League campus had the typical pests, plus, because its researchers travel to exotic places, some unusual ones- -like Pharaoh ants. At one time, these ants had also infested buildings in the Harvard Medical area, across town from the main campus, defying the best control measures. "They would march in columns across a room into a petri dish containing infectious material and out the other side," recalls Andrew Spielman, professor of tropical public health. At that time, scientists were just beginning to investigate the AIDS virus. And they had no good idea how it was spread. "These ants wandering in and out of the lab were a gross breach of any containment rules," says Spielman. Alpert adopted the approach he had used earlier in the biology building, with equal success, and according to Spielman "saved the AIDS program." Such episodes have been reduced, thanks to Harvard's increased attentiveness to monitoring its buildings for new infestations and screening shipments for exotic pests. In some ways, Alpert's common- sense approach to pest control masks another side of him--that of the idealistic, adventuresome conservation scientist. "I think you can combine science with adventure, if you do it right," he insists. In 1986, he macheted his way deep into the People's Republic of the Congo in search of a legendary dinosaur (which he never saw) and to collect exotic ant species. He had earned enough money from his companies, which function fairly independently of him, and enough points at Harvard that the university gives him two-month leaves to make trips like the one to the Congo. Last year, in Madagascar, he and his group had to keep moving all day to escape from a leopard whose kill they had scavenged because they needed fresh meat. Fifteen years earlier, he took a trip to the Dominican Republic to dig fossil amber from the mines there. He points proudly to articles published by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson using material Alpert brought back. "You can make a real contribution to science," he says. Alpert hopes that his research in Africa will help him find a way to use the number of ant species in an area as an indicator of biodiversity. That, in turn, will serve to identify areas most in need of conservation. He also has surveyed Madagascar's vanilla bean producers and hopes to promote nature's product over synthetic vanilla. At present, he is seeking outside support for an expedition by a team of Harvard scientists to develop a list of endangered natural areas that should be saved first. Madagascar is an important place to preserve, he says, because comparisons between species that exist there and in West Africa show that the island and West Africa have tended to remain stable over time and support relic species no longer found in other places. "I see myself doing more conservation work," he says, "putting together the academic sciences--systematics, biology, and biodiversity--with conservation. It all will be coming together." And with that, Alpert hopes to shift into a more traditional scientific career. "I'm crossing back over," he says. Even with all these accomplishments to his credit and an adjunct researcher position since 1988 at Harvard's prestigious Museum of Comparative Zoology, Alpert is still somewhat tentative as an academic. He is forever putting off writing up his data, and he failed five years ago in his only attempt to get funding from the National Science Foundation for a proposal to determine the true size of termite colonies. Indeed, becoming a traditional academic may require more determination and creativity than did pioneering urban pest control. His colleagues in science admire and, sometimes, envy all that Alpert has done. But they worry that he's been away too long, and that the field has advanced too rapidly for him to catch up. "It will be very difficult for him," says James Traniello, associate professor of biology at Boston University, who studies the evolution and ecology of social behavior in ants and termites. Still, Alpert plans to plow ahead and make the shift from pest control to more basic research in pursuit of greater scientific prestige. Besides, he adds, "If I am going to do ant research, Harvard is one of the best places to be."

Entomologist's Bent For Bug Busting Develops Into Profitable Business

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