Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 13, 1995 TAG: 9511130113
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TUCSON, ARIZ. LENGTH: Medium
Columbia University is taking over management of Biosphere 2, the glassed-in environment criticized by scientists when eight people tried to live there in self-supporting isolation for two years.
The agreement being announced today gives Columbia five years to run the huge greenhouse in an attempt to bring scientific legitimacy to a project that began as a sort of New Age ecological ark.
Edward Bass, the Texas billionaire who bankrolled the project and then wrested control from the cultlike group that built it, will continue to provide the bulk of the funding.
Exact terms weren't disclosed, but officials said Biosphere's budget will be $15 million to $17 million a year.
Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory will run scientific and educational operations as well as the growing tourist business, said university President George Rupp. However, the university doesn't plan any long live-in missions.
The 3-acre complex in the desert 30 miles north of Tucson contains a working farm and replicas of an ocean, savannah, rain forest and marsh, allowing scientists to study Earth's processes under controlled conditions.
``The intellectual lure of the Biosphere is tremendous,'' said Columbia geochemistry Professor Wallace Broecker, a member of the National Academy of Science who has been involved with the project for several years.
On Sept. 26, 1991, four men and four women donned ``Star Trek''-style uniforms and trooped through the giant terrarium's airlock doors, accompanied by music, visionary rhetoric and media hype.
Their professed goal: to spend two years in total self-sufficiency, growing their own food and recycling air, water and waste, as if they were on a long space mission.
Soon, however, a series of news leaks revealed that management was fudging on the self-sufficiency promise.
An air scrubbing system had to be installed because the natural systems couldn't keep carbon dioxide in balance. Fresh outside air had to be pumped in. A crew member who left for treatment of a finger injury secretly took back two duffel bags of nonfood supplies.
Crops failed, and the crew members lost an average of 25 pounds by the time they emerged Sept. 26, 1993.
Questions arose about the scientific and business abilities of top managers Margret Augustine and John Allen, whom Bass fired in March 1994, alleging financial mismanagement. That prompted a sabotage attempt by two former crew members who sneaked up one night and threw open the outside doors of the sealed project.
by CNB