ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

Sally Silverstone says that she will miss the beautiful lifestyle provided
by Biosphere 2: the view out over her farm, taking a dip in the artificial
ocean, working out in a gym complete with rowing machine, treadmill and
sauna, and being able to stroll through the rainforest. On 26 September,
Silverstone, one of the two English members of the eight-strong team of
‘biospherians’, will leave this all behind, as she and her colleagues emerge
from two years inside Biosphere 2 – a sealed glass and steel structure set
on 1.2 hectares of desert just north of Tucson, Arizona.

The biosphere project was inspired by John Allen, an American football
player turned Beat poet (Johnny Dolphin), who has worked on a number of
projects related to the synthesis of ecology and technology. In the early
1980s he formed Space Biospheres Ventures along with a number of colleagues
including the Texas billionaire Edward Bass, who provided the $150 million
funding for Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 is the Earth itself). Bass says he
is interested in developing ‘ecologically correct’ yet profitable enterprises,
and the goal with Biosphere 2 is to develop a closed ecological system
for research and education, and eventually for life on other planets, particularly
Mars.

But as the first biospherians prepare for their ‘re-entry’ to Biosphere
1, the biggest triumph they cite is simply staying inside, staying alive,
and still being on speaking terms after two years. Silverstone, who left
her work replanting rainforests in Puerto Rico to enter the biosphere, is
looking healthy and filled out these days, having recovered some of the
weight she lost during the project’s various food crises.

Silverstone was in charge of managing food production – a job which
included some intensive agriculture, and keeping chickens, pigs and goats
for milk and meat. A variety of problems plagued the food production efforts,
including unexpectedly cloudy winters leading to crop failures and mite
infestations (This Week, 20 February). In addition, the biosphere, which
was supposed to be totally self-supporting, never achieved equilibrium in
terms of gases, and the crew were faced with constantly declining oxygen
levels that needed supplementing from outside on two occasions.

Silverstone says that the stressful conditions led to frequent arguments
but no violence. ‘What I’ve learnt from this is you can have a group of
people and they have a very definite task, which in our case was to get
the biosphere operating for two years, and it can be done with very little
serious conflict,’ she says.

One of the reasons cited for this rational behaviour is that the biospherians
were not truly isolated. Friends and family could ‘visit’ by using a special
room where video cameras and speakers allow the biospherians and their visitors
to see and hear each other. They also had movies, news, and unlimited telephone
use. Any sense of isolation was also dispelled by more than 200,000 tourists
streaming past the structure each year. Biosphere 2’s ‘natural’ beauty is
also attributed with tension-soothing qualities. Silverstone says it’s like
building a home with separate rooms for everyone inside a luxuriant greenhouse,
complete with farm, desert, rainforest and mini-ocean.

She also says that she came to like the low calorie diet, which was
high in grains, beans and vegetables and low in animal products. At first
the diet was enforced rather than chosen because the resources inside the
biosphere could only support a limited number of animals, so the biospherians
had a restricted meat supply and got about one egg a week each. Their coffee
consumption was also limited by the yield of their coffee bushes – usually
enough for about one cup of coffee per biospherian per week. But now Silverstone
recommends the spartan diet and is considering sticking to it. She has even
written a cookbook entitled ‘Eating In: From the field to the kitchen in
Biosphere 2’ so that others can sample their cuisine.

Roy Walford, who took an extended sabbatical from his research at the
University of California, Los Angeles, to join the biosphere project as
its medical adviser and computer expert is another convert to this low fat,
low calorie, nutrient-rich diet. He carried out some physiological research
into the effects of the diet on the biospherians, and published his findings
of drastically lowered blood pressure and cholesterol in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 89, p11533. The biosphere proved
to be the perfect test crucible for this study. ‘This is about the only
way you can get eight people to eat exactly the same amount, a low calorie
amount,’ says Walford, who appears gaunt and run down and seems to have
fared less well on the low calorie diet than Silverstone.

Walford agrees that the biospherians seemed to hold together as a working
unit surprisingly well, although there was plenty of irritation and even
one attack. One biospherian – who he declined to identify – threw a teacup
at a colleague during the third month of their stay inside. ‘Fortunately,
he missed him, but I saved (a piece of) the teacup.’ It was the only weapon
fired in anger during the two years, he says. He feels the lack of serious
conflict was a matter of necessity, not choice. ‘There’s too much work that
has to be done in cooperation for you to totally blow off somebody and not
³¦´Ç´Ç±è±ð°ù²¹³Ù±ð.’

Studied silence

What he finds unfortunate is that no rigorous studies of the group’s
psychological dynamics were undertaken, because the directors of SBV did
not want to turn the crew into psychological guinea pigs. There was no psychometric
testing such as stress assessment, which Walford believes could have been
valuable for research into the way confined isolated groups interact. This
is an omission that will be rectified when the next crew take over in five
months’ time. In the absence of such formal testing, it was up to the biospherians
to do their own psychological monitoring. One point Walford noted was that
they fell prey to the ‘third quarter phenomenon’ where regardless of the
length of confinement, any isolated group will experience the greatest stress
in the third quarter. In Biosphere 2 tensions were greatest between the
12th and 18th months – although nobody reached the point of raising their
teacup in anger again.

The lack of formal research has attracted a lot of criticism from the
media and from independent scientists . But the biospherians insist that
the project will be justified by the papers they intend to publish after
their release. One of their papers will concentrate on how their bodies
adapted to the normal pressure but low oxygen content atmosphere for several
months. It is the quality of this sort of research and its acceptance into
the top journals that will ultimately determine whether scientists will
accept and appreciate Biosphere 2.

Jack Corliss, the burly, bearded and loquacious science director for
the project, foresees a ‘flood of papers’ coming from the project. One,
for instance, will detail where the missing oxygen went; others could look
at how plants and coral adapted to carbon dioxide levels inside Biosphere
2 that were up to ten times as high as normal. Corliss, who was hired at
the request of a panel of outside scientists, came to the project in June
from NASA, where he was studying how life evolved on Earth. Corliss says
he wants to inject scientific credibility into a project that is distrusted
and scoffed at by scientists. ‘I’m supposed to do good science and see that
good science is done and presumably what follows from that is less controversy.’

His own interest is in creating a complex mathematical model of the
way nutrients and gases pass between the animals, plants, water and air
inside the closed system. This could then be used as a way of learning about
how such cycles work on Earth. He also says that because Biosphere 2 is
ultimately a commercial venture, he foresees spin-offs such as new intensive
agriculture techniques and waste recycling processes, and products such
as an indoor air purifier that uses soil microbes to remove contaminants.
Besides these spin-offs, the project could lead to habitable structures
on the Moon or even Mars.

Abigail Alling, who halted her graduate work at Yale University on blue
whales to enter Biosphere 2 as the manager of oceans and marshes, says she
was elated to disprove the critics who said Biosphere 2 would flop and especially
those who said that her beloved coral reef would die. In fact, says Alling,
it appears to be thriving and is completely self-sustaining with 42 species
of fish and 35 species of coral and, of course, 15-centimetre-high artificially
generated waves. A particularly intriguing line of research in the future
will be determining how the coral survived the high levels of carbon dioxide
which acidified the water. This line of research could provide clues as
to how marine life will respond to rising carbon dioxide levels.

But it won’t be Alling, Silverstone or Walford who will be carrying
out this research; they will be back in the outside world. Walford says
that he will be returning to his research at UCLA and he will act as a consultant
to Biosphere 2. Walford says he’ll miss life in the biosphere, but no more
than he missed his sabbatical years in India or in Paris. ‘I wouldn’t have
missed the experience for the world, but I’ll be happy to be back in big
city life, which is the kind of life I like.’

Silverstone says: ‘I’m looking at (leaving biosphere) with mixed feelings.
On the one hand, I’ll be happy to see family and friends again and go for
long walks and go shopping. On the other hand, I’ll miss waking up in the
morning inside this beautiful structure.’ But she won’t be totally divorced
from the project because one of her first tasks on leaving will be to train
the next crew of biospherians. They are scheduled to begin their stay in
about five months’ time and will stay about ten months. Outside scientists
hope that this next crew will be able to provide better controlled scientific
data, and will be willing to partake in psychological studies on the effects
of their isolation.

As for Alling, her goal is Mars. She says she will forsake work on marine
mammals to write her dissertation on the design for a Mars base. ‘If you’re
talking long-term settlement in space, you’re going to have to have something
like this. I don’t mean to say Biosphere 2 will exist on other planets.
But what we can learn form Biosphere 2 is how can you support humans long
term, what is required for air, water and food.’ Alling believes the settlement
of Mars will happen in her lifetime through the combined efforts of commerce
and government, and she wants to be part of it. ‘It’s the obvious next step,’
she says.

Scott Veggeberg is a freelance journalist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

* * *

Nice conditions – but is it good science?

Biosphere 2 provides a marvellous opportunity for doing earth science
research. The trouble is very little science seems to be under way, and
many researchers say the situation will not change if the present management
stay in charge. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s say that the directors of Space Biosphere Ventures,
the private company behind the experiment, along with the Texas billionaire
who financed the project, are far too steeped in New Age philosophies, theatre
and art, cooperative living, organic farming, and living an idyllic existence
in space or on Mars.

According to Gerald Soffen, a biologist with NASA and an observer of
and adviser to Biosphere 2, the biosphere project could be used as a research
tool to delve into questions such as the effects of global warming, ‘but
that’s never happened’. Soffen, who was project director of the Mars Viking
missions between 1975 and 1982, adds that it hasn’t been an experiment,
as claimed, but that it’s more like a demonstration project, and there are
no controls. ‘All they’ve done is close the door and see if they can keep
conditions the same,’ he says, adding that they have only been partially
successful because of food shortages and a puzzling decline in oxygen that
needed outside help earlier this year.

Soffen was a member of the science advisory committee that was formed
last year and eventually disbanded after increasing friction with the directors
of the project, as well as the biospherians inside. One achievement of the
committee was to convince the directors of SBV that they needed to hire
an on-site science adviser. The trouble, according to Soffen, is that the
man they selected, Jack Corliss, although a fine scientist and a former
NASA colleague, lacks the assertive management skills to pull the scientific
end of this project together. As a result, says Soffen, the quality of
science will probably not improve. Other NASA scientists agree that without
controls, and with no ability to separate sections of the project and manipulate
variables, little can be learned.

Eugene Odum, a researcher at the University of Georgia and one of the
pioneers of ecology, sees the project in a more favourable light. He defended
the project in an editorial (Science, vol 260, p 878) in which he said:
‘The experiment is not traditional, reductionist, discipline-oriented science,
but a new, more holistic level of ecosystem science called `biospherics’.’
While defending the decision by project directors to throw a lot of variables
together and let them sort themselves out, he says the SBV directors now
appear to be adopting more mainstream scientific standards. They may even
be willing to divide the biosphere into sections in the future to provide
for controls and allow researchers to manipulate variables such as alterations
in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. However, in the past outside scientists
say that the SBV directors objected strenuously to this idea on the grounds
that to do so would damage the holistic nature of the project. An alternative
may be to build a number of smaller test modules in which to do controlled
experiments.

Robert Howarth, an aquatic ecologist at Cornell University, New York,
is also optimistic about Biosphere 2. He is an unpaid adviser to the project
and believes the project is running smoothly and that the management style
is fine. He plans to do research on how plants and corals responded to
the raised levels of carbon dioxide inside Biosphere 2 during the five
months between the first crew leaving and the second crew entering the structure.
He says that the real scientific opportunities offered by the project are
just beginning to emerge.

For many scientists the only real science to have emerged from the past
two years of Biosphere 2 was solving the problem of the missing oxygen and
carbon dioxide – and that was the result of research by Jeff Severinghaus,
an outsider drafted in for this task. By collecting samples passed to him
through the airlock, Severinghaus, who was a geochemistry graduate student
at Lahmont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York state, and his colleagues
determined that soil microbes, fuelled by the copious amounts of manure
and organic matter in the biosphere’s imported soil, were producing more
carbon dioxide than the SBV directors anticipated.

But this extra carbon dioxide in the air was still not enough to account
for all the missing oxygen. The missing gas turned up in the concrete. Carbon
dioxide reacts with a minor component of concrete, calcium hydroxide, to
form calcium carbonate and in this way it was being removed from circulation.
It’s a fairly well-known phenomenon known to engineers as carbonation of
concrete. He feels this problem and the overzealous microbes could have
been predicted had biosphere managers consulted and listened to experts
in soil microbiology.

He says his work with the project highlighted the biospherians’ hostility
to the way traditional science is conducted. He adds: ‘There’s a certain
arrogance, like they think they’re too good for the mainstream.’ But now
that they have seen the value of the mainstream, deductive scientific method,
project participants seem to be ‘coming around’.

While researchers disagree on how well scientists can work with the
present management of Biosphere 2 in trying to solve ecological problems,
they all agree that it’s a superbly engineered structure, with an impressive
leak rate of only 10 per cent of gases per year. One of the engineering
features that help prevent leakage are the ‘lungs’, designed by engineer
Bill Dempster. These lungs are white dome-shaped expansion chambers connected
to the biosphere by underground passages that are lined with enormous rubber
sheets. Like balloons, these sheets expand and inflate when the air warms
up in the daytime and deflate during the cooler nights, so maintaining a
steady pressure inside and minimising leakage.

Biosphere 2 has the potential to be a marvellous vehicle for doing ecological
research. Soffen says that if he had the $150 million it cost to construct
it, he’d certainly buy it. He does say, however, that he would run it his
way.