This is an IHeart podcast.

And we're back with our American stories.

Up next, Madison brings us a story from Nathaniel Frank. Nathaniel is the CEO and founder of

M. Toxin's Venom Lab, which extracts high volumes of snake and scorpion venom for the production of

anti-venom. Here's Nathaniel with the story of how he got involved in his unique career.

So I grew up in northeastern Wisconsin, and about six years old, I became just obsessed with reptiles.

And that was because a neighbor had given me an old Peterson's field guide.

And I would flip through it and go out and try to find all the animals that were in our

region that were in there.

And it just started a lifelong passion for these animals.

In those field guides as a child, there were pictures of a type of snake called a coral

snake that absolutely fascinated me, and I always said one day I'm going to work with them.

In about 2011, I started keeping coral snakes, and I was keeping a type of coral snake that was incredibly rare.

I was the only one keeping them in the United States at the time, and a scientist from Australia had seen that on Facebook and said, can you provide me some samples of that venom?

It was really learning under fire, which I would never recommend to anyone.

But a gentleman who had been producing venom since the 60s kind of took me under his wing

and worked with me on safety and what I needed to do to be able to do that. And we did, and it led to a very successful

scientific publication. Then the question was, what else can you provide me? So it turned into

providing venom from a hundred different species at one time and it grew very quickly.

And that led into providing venom to pharmaceutical companies.

And that's now our main source of revenue providing venoms for Asia, the Middle East,

South America and all of Africa.

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