TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/093091/0930300.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                SCIENCE, Page 66

The Wizards of Hokum


Like many grand enterprises dressed up as serious science,
Biosphere 2 is part publicity stunt

By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS -- Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York and
Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles


    At dawn outside Oracle, Ariz., this week, amid Indian
chants and whirring cameras, four men and four women clad in
bright red jumpsuits will wave farewell to this world and enter
a newly minted one. For two years they will live inside a sealed
terrarium, about the size of 2 1/2 football fields, that mimics
a more primitive earth. Tending their crops and livestock, they
will receive nothing from outside. Dubbed Biosphere 2 (the
earth is Biosphere 1), the glass-and-steel-enclosed structure
has been seeded with 3,800 species of plants and animals in
five different wilderness ecosystems: a desert, savannah, rain
forest, marsh and 7.6-m-deep (25-ft.-deep) "ocean" complete with
coral reef. The experiment, seven years and $100 million in the
making, has been hailed as the most exciting scientific project
since the effort to put man on the moon.

    But Biosphere 2 raises a question that vexes researchers:
Is it grand science or a grand stunt? The scheme boasts great
ambitions: to learn more about our fragile ecosystems and how
to restore them, and to create a self-sustaining environment
that could serve as a model for space stations or colonies on
other planets like Mars. Colossal and romantic, the project has
attracted the participation of scores of researchers from august
institutions, including M.I.T., Yale, the Smithsonian, Britain's
Royal Botanic Gardens and the University of Arizona's
Environmental Research Laboratory.

    But many scientists see Biosphere 2 as a kook's dream and
a rich man's whim: John Allen, who used to call himself Johnny
Dolphin, the engineer, ecologist and poet-playwright who
hatched the scheme and heads the project, and Texas billionaire
Edward Bass, who is financing the venture, have been described
as onetime members of a cultlike commune. Biosphere participants
have admitted that the degrees some of them received from the
Institute of Ecotechnics in London are something of a sham; the
institute was set up by Bass to confer legitimacy on the
project.

    Flimsy credentials are matched by flimsy premises, say
critics. For one thing, knowledge of the earth's ecosystems is
still so limited that it is ridiculous to attempt to duplicate
one environment, let alone five. And NASA researchers, who have
spent more than a decade studying how people could support
themselves in space, scoff at the idea that a two-year project
will produce meaningful results. To many scientists, Biosphere
2 is little more than an ecological theme park. By summer's end,
600 tourists a day -- at $9.95 an adult -- were visiting the
site and its well-stocked gift shop.

    Biosphere 2 is not the only project to blur the line
between hokum and hard science. In fact, a vital symbiosis seems
to be developing. Today even the purest adventuring, from
climbing Mount Everest to trekking across Antarctica, often
comes cloaked in scientific respectability. Consider the 1990
International Trans-Antarctica Expedition. Publicity about the
seven-month trek played up the scientific recollecting snow
samples, conducting experiments in meteorology and monitoring
the team's physiology. But the expedition emerged mainly as an
exotic sporting event. To date, few scientific findings have
been published, and critics point out that such information can
be obtained in cheaper and safer ways.

    In a bid to capture public favor -- and scarce research
money -- more and more scientists are indulging in overripe
theatrics. Marine geologist Robert Ballard of Woods Hole, Mass.,
for example, hyped his search for the wreck of the Titanic to
lure funds for more serious efforts to develop sophisticated
underwater cameras and robots. "It's a very fuzzy line," says
Barry Gold of the National Academy of Sciences. "When is a
scientist a good entrepreneur, and when does he become P.T.
Barnum?"

    As for the Biospherians, they insist that there is nothing
fraudulent about their enterprise and chalk up many of the
objections to misunderstandings between "hard" scientists and
those in the softer field of environmental research. Ecosystems
cannot be strictly controlled as can experiments in a lab,
observes Kathleen Dyhr, the project's director of
communications. "The charges are those every ecosystem ecologist
has to face all the time from laboratory scientists."

    Defenders of the project predict there will be solid
scientific findings and benefits, but even if there are not, so
what? Inventor Paul MacCready, who has won both public praise
and scientific acclaim for designing the human-powered flying
machines known as the Gossamer Condor and Gossamer Albatross,
contends that the true measure of a project's value is not
whether it produces hard data but whether it provokes the human
mind. "Who can say Lindbergh's flight was scientifically
important?" he asks. "There was no new land discovered, and if
you asked at the time, people might have said the development
of the eggbeater was of more value. But the flight ended up
stimulating aviation." As for the trip to the moon, "all we
really got out of that was a handful of dirt," he notes, "but
it gave us new insights into the way we view the world." So bon
voyage, Biospherians!