Each female mosquito lays 100 to 500 eggs in a clutch. So if you can entrap just one gestating mosquito, Lebost reasoned, you’re really eliminating hundreds in just one generation. Since his trap design targets gravid females, it’s a lot more efficient than conventional mosquito control methods like nets or spraying. Best of all, Lebost estimates that his kit can be manufactured to retail for less than a dollar each. For developing countries, where recipients might be tempted to use a sturdy plastic box for something other than its intended use, he envisions an even-more-inexpensive version made of plastic-coated cardboard that would last for a rainy season and then break down easily.
“We see a very large market,” says Lebost, in the US and especially in tropical countries in Africa, Central and South America. Since mosquitoes in the wild feed primarily on livestock, he envisions farms as great potential sites for large arrays of traps set under canopies, brightly lit at night to attract every pregnant mosquito for miles around. Closer to home, he sees patios and terraces, stores and restaurants as likely places to set the traps.
This isn’t the first bright idea to occur to Barry Lebost. A veteran of many years of installing fiber-optic communication networks and voiceover IP trading systems for Wall Street, he has been awarded a total of four patents. A prototype of his Lebost Wind Turbine was installed on the roof of a building at New York University in 1979: the first-ever such application in an urban environment. He currently works as a consultant designing and installing micro-hydropower plants for homes and businesses.
In the long run, if the theory that he calls Accelerated Concentric Radial Expansion turns out to be correct, the most significant legacy of this rural Renaissance Man may end up being his take on the weighty subject of the force of gravity. In his self-published book The Universal Properties of Acceleration: How Gravity Actually Works, Lebost explains how Albert Einstein’s original instinct to believe that gravity and inertia were exactly the same thing, and not just mathematically equivalent, may actually be the better explanation, given what we now know about the expansion of the universe. You can see an abbreviated dramatization of Lebost’s argument in a video on his website, www.barrylebost.com, starring the comedian Carl Reiner (who happens to be Lebost’s uncle) in the role of Einstein.
As if that weren’t enough going on in the Lebost household, Barry also happens to be married to a Renaissance Woman with a brand-new achievement hot off the presses. Alice Wexler, director of the Art Education program at SUNY-New Paltz, has just published a textbook for art educators under the Palgrave imprint at Macmillan, titled Art Education Beyond the Classroom: Pondering the Outsider and Other Sites of Learning.
Wexler started out as a working artist, got involved with using art to teach people with disabilities while working toward her EDD at Columbia Teachers’ College and went on to become an acknowledged expert in the field, creating a program at SUNY that has become a national model. Some of the disabled local youth with whom Wexler’s college students have worked have now gone on to pursue undergraduate degrees and certification as art educators themselves.
Lebost and Wexler bonded through their shared practice in the Nichiren Daishonin school of Buddhism, after Lebost’s first wife died from ovarian cancer in 2007. Perhaps it’s the Buddhist worldview of compassion and the quest for “right livelihood” that fuels Lebost’s drive to invent things that promote sustainability while helping people all over the globe: “It’s extremely exciting to get involved in something that can make a difference,” he says, “to do some good, and not just make money.”
