The Creepy Cellar Of The Merchant Of Venom

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It often takes hundreds of spiders and the better part of a day to harvest enough venom--a few drops--to fill an order. For their trouble, Chuck and Anita each week send out up to three or four packages of frozen or freeze-dried venom, usually to pharmaceutical and chemical companies. It's a hard way to make a living, even when it is supplemented by income from odd jobs like the technical-adviser gig Chuck landed for the 1990 film Arachnophobia. So for most of the past decade, Chuck handed scaled-back day-to-day operations of Spider Pharm to Anita--a former machinist from Czechoslovakia who has become as smitten as her husband with spiders--while he worked for American Cyanamid, helping the company investigate spider venom for possible use in new insecticides.

But Chuck wasn't very happy with the work or the management turnover at American Cyanamid, and last year he returned full time to his true calling--"to make venom widely available for research." To better carry out this mission, he has branched out geographically, developing new supplies of venom from as far away as China and Kazakhstan. Spiders are everywhere, he says, and you never know which one will lead to a scientific or medical breakthrough.