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Ernest James Harris was born in North Little Rock on May 24, 1928, the youngest of six children. His parents, James and Dorothy, expected their children to help the family work their forty-five-acre cotton farm. The entire family planted mainly cotton in the spring and harvested it in the fall, and this was the family’s main source of income. During those busy planting and harvesting seasons, the Harris children were expected to work through the day and miss school.
Young Ernest didn’t mind this too much as a child, but the school principal noticed. He brought work out for the children to do in the evenings so the children could rejoin their classes and not be behind. Ernest Harris never forgot the importance this principal placed on his education and the effort he made to visit the children.
Harris also took pride in his schoolwork. He wasn’t a talkative child, but he had a strong imagination. Though he enjoyed his family, he constantly dreamed of what life would be like if he could travel farther than the family farm in Arkansas. One childhood experience that deeply impacted Harris’s future came from his mother’s garden. Harris says his mother was “a pretty smart lady and could have done…a lot more things than she had the opportunity to do.”
The family garden was a vital source of fresh food, and Dorothy focused on protecting the vegetables from insects and pests. Harris remembers his mother saying to him, “When you are working out here, pay attention to the plant. If you see holes in the leaves of the plant, that usually means that there’s an insect chewing on that somewhere.” She showed her son how to pick the bugs off the plants and put them in a glass mason jar. Through this, Harris learned how to approach insect problems and that sometimes all you need is a simple solution.
Harris graduated from high school in 1946 and went to Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, choosing to study biology with a minor in chemistry. A good friend invited him to move to Milwaukee after graduation. Harris worked in Wisconsin, using his chemistry minor in manufacturing. On a trip back to Arkansas to visit his parents, he decided to return to Wisconsin by train. On that train, he met a young woman, Bettye Jo Hawkins, who was on her way to Milwaukee to visit a friend. When the train stopped in Chicago, and most people got off, those continuing to Wisconsin were placed in the same train car, allowing the two to chat. Harris mentioned he could show Bettye Jo around the city. They eventually married and enjoyed sixty years together.
While in Wisconsin, Harris realized he wanted to pursue further education and enrolled at Marquette, where he studied for a master’s degree in zoology. A classmate was spending the summer working for the U.S. Forestry Service, which sounded interesting to Harris. He applied and was assigned to Arnold Drews, a forest entomologist in Minnesota. That summer of studying insects took Harris back to his roots, working with his mother in the family garden, and changed the direction of his career. He transferred from Marquette to the University of Minnesota in 1947 and spent the summer before his enrollment working in the Minnesota forests, observing and recording insect damage to trees.
Harris earned his master’s in entomology and applied to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At the same time, a former professor in Arkansas contacted him about a job opportunity to teach in the state. When he didn’t hear from the USDA, he took the teaching job at Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College. The next day, the Minnesota Forestry Service offered Harris a job as a forest entomologist. He had a choice to make. Fortunately, the college in Pine Bluff agreed to let Harris out of his teaching contract if he found a suitable replacement, and he did through a good friend who agreed to teach instead. Harris figured the USDA didn’t want to offer him a job, but a few months later, they contacted him about an opportunity to join a project focused on eradicating fruit flies. Harris and his wife moved to Hawaii for the new job, the farthest yet from Arkansas.
Harris joined Dr. Edward Knipling, who was doing groundbreaking work on the sterile insect technique, in which scientists breed sterile insects to release into the wild to reduce the overall insect population in an area. This technique had the potential to replace the widespread use of pesticides and to be applied to much larger areas. Harris was excited to join the work. His role in the project included a move to the island of Guam, where Harris would receive the sterile flies and release them. The program targeted oriental fruit flies and proved successful. Harris returned to Honolulu, where he continued to work with the sterile insect technique, but he also became interested in ecology—the way organisms interact with one another. He remembered how his mother carefully removed the insects from their garden and placed them in jars. How could he bring that approach to his work?
Harris began photographing the surrounding vegetation on Oahu as he worked, creating a visual log that later allowed him to see how the area changed over time. He also decided to complete his education by earning a doctoral degree at the University of Hawaii. However, the success of the fruit fly eradication program had drawn interest from other countries. Tunisia wanted someone from the program to come to Africa and develop a similar project on Mediterranean fruit flies, called medflies.
Medflies were endemic to the area and highly destructive to agriculture and vegetation. Harris recognized another opportunity he’d only dreamed about growing up on the farm in Arkansas. Harris moved his young family to Tunisia and worked with the new program for three years while finishing his doctoral degree. He used the project to write his dissertation and returned to Hawaii, where Harris tackled a new problem: the growing list of invasive insects in Hawaii.
These insects were arriving through fruit on ships and causing damage to native vegetation. One main culprit was the tephritid fruit fly, which originated in Asia and Africa. Harris already knew that one of the best ways to control the problem was to find a natural predator of fruit flies, and a particular type of wasp, Fopius arisanus, could do the trick—but there was a problem. Nobody had been able to get the species to reproduce in a lab and breed enough wasps for a release. The lab-bred wasps were all male, the opposite result of what Harris needed.
Harris believed it could be done, even if his counterparts didn’t. He quietly developed a program to breed the wasps, working with a Japanese and a Chinese technician who also thought they could get the wasps to reproduce both females and males. Harris gathered his first samples from the areas he had photographed earlier in his career, already familiar with where he had seen the wasps before. He methodically bred the wasps in his project, using a higher female-to-male ratio. After breeding thirty-three generations, they began to see more females emerge. Harris had found the right ratio of male to female wasps to create a sustainable program, a success for the area and for Harris, who was recognized for his significant contribution to fruit fly control and eradication in Hawaii, California, Florida, and beyond.
Dr. Ernest James Harris, Jr. smiles after receiving the Congressional Gold Medal during a ceremony in Honolulu Nov. 12, 2016. Harris was awarded his Congressional Gold Medal for his service as a Montford Point Marine. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Wesley Timm)
He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2016 and inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Agricultural Research Service Science Hall of Fame in 2017. Over his long career as a research entomologist, Harris wrote hundreds of research papers, building a large body of work on fruit fly eradication and breeding wasps to control that population. Harris credited the USDA and ARS for giving him the opportunities to pursue his interest in insects, but it was his mother who first cultivated that dream on a cotton farm in Arkansas. Ernest J. Harris died at the age of 89 in Hawaii in 2018.
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