By Scott Helman, Boston Globe
CHENSHENG LU hardly cuts the profile of a provocateur. He dresses business casual and wears silver-rimmed glasses. He lives in Wellesley. He gardens. He has two children, one in high school, another in college. He occupies a tidy office in the Landmark Center, as an associate professor in the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health. And yet the mention of Lu’s name in certain quarters elicits palpable discomfort: Oh, him.
Lu, who is 49 and goes by Alex, grew up a city kid in Taipei, the youngest of three siblings. He rode his bike to the baseball field, sometimes to the comic-book store. He knew little about agriculture, little about nature. Then he came to the United States for graduate school, first to Rutgers University and then to the University of Washington, where he got his PhD in environmental health. In the Pacific Northwest, Lu found his calling: tracking pesticide exposure in food, homes, and workplaces. The prevalence of these chemicals, he grew convinced, was a critical and understudied aspect of public health.
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For nearly all this time, Ken Warchol was in Northbridge, teaching social studies to middle school and high school students, playing a 19th-century industrialist in historical reenactments, and coaching track and cross-country. On the side, Warchol, who is 63, tended to his lifelong passion of beekeeping, operating his own hives, helping other bee enthusiasts around Worcester County, and examining apiaries as a state inspector. “My whole life,” he says, “I’ve been with bees.”
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A sixth-generation beekeeper, Warchol traces the family tradition to Poland in the 1840s. His father brought the practice and tools with him to the United States after World War II. Several years later, Warchol, as a young boy, got his first hive from his father, who made him a wager: Whoever had more honey at collection time won dinner at the Bungalow, a restaurant down the road. Warchol can still remember the particulars of his victory. He had 84 pounds of honey to his dad’s 76, and he got steak at the Bungalow. Only recently, as his mother was dying, did she spill the secret. His father had given him the strongest hive so he could win.
Dick Callahan grew up nearby in Worcester and earned a PhD in entomology from the University of Massachusetts, inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which chronicled the damage wrought by pesticides and sparked the modern environmental movement. After four years in the Air Force, he embarked on a career as a scientist and entrepreneur, running environmental surveys in the ocean, cofounding and taking public a pharmaceutical firm, and then helping others start their own companies. “I’m a real capitalist,” the retired 72-year-old says.
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