The Bedbug King of New York

Louis Sorkin, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, feeds his research subjects with his own blood. Sorkin, you see, is one of the world's experts on bedbugs, and he finds it handy to keep a readily available food source nearby.

Letting bedbugs parasitize him is a good way to keep costs and inventory down, but it also lets Sorkin empathize with the thousands of New Yorkers who suffer the bites unwillingly each night. He literally feels their pain. As the creatures—once mostly controlled with heavy use of pesticides such as DDT—make a comeback, the tightly packed urban metropolis of the five boroughs has been a major staging ground for their resurgence.