September 1991. Four men and four women entered Biosphere 2 — the planet Earth is considered Biosphere 1 — to begin a two-year stint of living in a self-contained environment. They were accompanied by a vast media blitz issuing such paeans as, “The most exciting scientific project to be undertaken since Kennedy launched the United States to the moon!”

In September 1993, the “biospherians” emerged to accusations from much of the scientific community that the entire project was a farce. Now the controversy surrounding Biosphere 2 has entered a new phase with the arrest of Abigail Alling, who was the manager of oceans and marshes within the complex and who has Maine ties, on charges of sabotaging the project. She claims the project is being so badly mismanaged that the life of the second crew was in danger. She, and a former fellow-biospherian, broke windows and left airlocks open to let fresh air into the complex.

On paper, the 3.2-acre, glassed-in enclosure should have been a minature Eden. It contained a small farm and five different habitats, a rain forest, savannah, desert, marsh, and ocean. An estimated 4,000 species of plants, animals, and insects were released to find their ecological niches in the system. The eight inhabitants were to study the interactions of these diverse systems in the hope that data useful to the understanding of global dynamics would result.

Things began to go wrong almost at once. First, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose to the point where Biosphere managers installed a scrubber to remove it. Of greater concern was a drop in oxygen levels to the point where the inhabitants were working at an equivalent elevation of 12,500 feet. Again, the Biosphere managers breached the self-contained concept by pumping in oxygen.

Only one of the inhabitants had the graduate training in science considered by most of the scientific community as necessary to do real research. Even if they had the training, they were too busy trying to grow enough food to survive to do much serious science. Crop failures, and an infestation of mites among their animals led to a meagre 1,700-calorie-a-day diet high in grains, beans, and vegetables, with very little animal products. The inhabitants lost an average 14 percent of their body weight.

Theories have been advanced as to the unexpected carbon dioxide elevations and oxygen depletions but these have come from outside consultants and not the biospherians. The project was suspect to many scientists because Edward Bass, the Texan billionaire who funded the $150 million project, seemed more interested in selling tickets for tourists to peer through the glass walls at the inhabitants than in scientific research. Also. the project was the brainchild of former football player turned Beat poet John Allen who now has New Age connections. Fairly or not, the word was that some biospherians were chosen for cult connections rather than their scientific ability.

To counter these charges, Allen obtained a science advisory board headed by Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institution. The board, however, resigned en masse in October 1993 stating that the Biosphere directors kept them in ignorance of manykey decisions and that they were not serious about accepting scientific advice. Space Biospheres Ventures, the private company in charge of Biosphere 2 attempted to counter this latest setback by hiring John Corliss, a biologist who was doing computer studies of life in Martian space colonies for NASA, to be the projects science manager. Again, scientists were not buying the move saying that Corliss was a reputable scientist, but not equipped to turn around a project of such magnitude. Corliss maintains that a flood of research papers will come out of the data collected by the first biospherians in the months to come.

Meanwhile, a new team entered the complex in early March to begin a new two-year stint amidst promises that things would be greatly different. Now the sabotage by Alling, who is leveling charges that the crew’s lives were in danger, has cast new doubt on the project. Only time will tell if what started as a major scientific experiment ends as a tourist attraction.

Clair Wood is a science instructor at Eastern Maine Technical College and the NEWS science columnist.