It’s been a clash of cultures from the start. Part education and tourism, part marketing and part science, Biosphere 2 attracted 230,000 visitors last year and rang up more than $4 million in gift-shop sales. But as science, Biosphere 2 is not living up to its billing. It is supposed to be a “closed” system, recycling air, water and waste, and receiving nothing from the outside but sunlight and electricity and computer and telephone communications. But last year engineers secretly “scrubbed” rising levels of carbon dioxide from the air in the glass dome. And last month, after oxygen had plummeted mysteriously from 21 to 15 percent of the atmosphere (a level found at elevations of 12,500 feet), they pumped in oxygen. By deviating from the rules, Biosphere 2 may lose the chance to find out whether the oxygen is, as geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University suspects, going into the iron in the 34,000 tons of dirt in its rain forest, savanna, marsh, ocean and farm. It’s more than an academic question: earth’s oxygen levels are also dropping, though extremely gradually. As long as Biosphere 2 gets oxygen infusions, it cannot show how a selfsustaining world works-or fails.
The eight “Biosphereans” did learn from another setback. Crop failures limited them to 1,750 calories a day for much of last year. That deprivation led to the first scientific paper out of Biosphere 2, as Dr. Roy Walford reported that the low-calorie, low-fat regime cut cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and weight. That had been shown in lab animals; Biosphere 2 may prove that a spartan diet retards aging and promotes health in people, too.
That might have been more likely if the advisory board had stayed on. It might happen, still, once Biosphere 2 appoints a science director, as the panel urged months ago. If Biosphere 2 aspires to be more than a spa under glass, it had best find a researcher to keep the experiment on track.
