Charges of Deception, Commercialism Fill the Air at Biosphere

The four men and four women were to be sealed inside the glass-and-steel structure, raising their own food, recycling their air, water and wastes, independent and untouched by the world outside.

That, at least, is what they said.

But in the four months that Biosphere 2 has operated, project sponsors have pumped in fresh air from outside. They have admitted to secretly installing a machine to scrub carbon dioxide from the air. They have acknowledged that the artificial world was stocked with food ahead of time.

Some former employees or people close to the project are charging fraud and deception. Other sources say it’s just a matter of inept public relations. In either case, the credibility of a project that once promised to blaze a trail for the survival of Earth’s species has eroded.

Among the most serious accusations:

* A crew member who left for medical treatment secretly brought back a duffel bag full of supplies--including, one critic says, a supply of seals that are supposed to prove the air-lock doors haven’t been opened.

* Computer programs that monitor conditions inside the dome were designed to permit tampering with the data.

Space Biospheres Ventures, the private company that developed the project, denies those specific allegations as well as others by critics of Biosphere management, said spokesman Larry Winokur.

But a key consultant, Carl Hodges, director of the University of Arizona’s Environmental Research Laboratory, has gone to Texas billionaire Ed Bass--the prime funding source for Biosphere 2--and urged him to “do everything possible” to save the project’s credibility.

Hodges, who apparently has been severed from the project at least for now, told the Arizona Daily Star that he expressed his “deep concern over the status of the project, particularly as it is being interpreted from reports coming from the biosphere project to the press, to the public.”

Just what is going on inside Biosphere 2 is difficult to verify--partly, it seems, because the project’s managers are not reluctant to litigate.

One critic is being sued by Biosphere officials. Some former employees say they fear retaliation if they speak out; some worry that their home phones are bugged. Outside environmental and life sciences specialists contacted for comment generally declined to be quoted by name. Those still working at the site have been required to sign statements promising not to talk to reporters or sue the company--or even to acknowledge that such statements exist.

One scientist unaffiliated with the project who is willing to speak for the record is Larry Slobodkian of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a general ecologist who once worked with NASA on closed systems in space.

He says Biosphere 2’s introduction of fresh air, storage of food and outside energy production “disqualifies the installation as a closed experiment, but we already knew that. So it’s an exercise of a very strange kind of living in very close proximity in almost a prison-like situation.”

Slobodkian notes that the project depends on electricity from outside the dome, uses air conditioning and lacks experimental controls.

The 3.15-acre “mini-planet” featuring a tiny ocean, savanna and 3,800 species of plants and animals, was sealed Sept. 26 for a two-year experiment.

Biosphere officials said beforehand that this was not pure science but a science-oriented business. Visitors are charged $9.95 for escorted tours of the outside of the walls. The project’s for-profit bent and increasing thrust as a major tourist attraction--complete with plans for a conference center, hotel, golf course and space camp--have provided more fuel for skeptics.

Consultant Walter Adey, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Marine Systems Laboratory, severed his ties with the project within days of the closure. Adey, who designed Biosphere 2’s ocean, since has told the Washington Post he is greatly disappointed with how the ocean turned out--with little productivity or diversity of species.

Adey also said he is distraught that the entire project, which he viewed as a serious scientific experiment, has evolved a Disneyland approach and now holds the potential to discredit his field of synthetic ecology.

The project’s cost was publicly placed at $150 million. Some have suggested it is closer to a half-billion dollars.

Hundreds of reporters attended the closing ceremonies, and Biosphere 2 became a staple in Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” monologues.

Unannounced during the hoopla was the last-minute inclusion within the complex of a scrubber to strip carbon dioxide from the air. The scrubber seemed to belie the project’s contention that the mix of plant and animal species would handle naturally the production of carbon dioxide.

On Oct. 9, crew member Jane Poynter sliced off a fingertip in a threshing accident. She left the structure Oct. 11 for surgery and returned within hours, proclaiming eagerness to return to her isolated, self-sufficient world.

When she did, she took with her a duffel bag of materials. But that was not disclosed until Jan. 4, when Space Biospheres Ventures issued a “background report” saying the supplies included plastic bags, two reference books, maps showing plant locations, color film, hydrochloric acid and spare computer parts.

In early December, though, California filmmaker Louis Hawthorne, who spent several weeks at the biosphere as it was being prepared for closure, said his contacts told a different story.

They told him that Poynter carried two bags containing steel fittings, hydrochloric acid and “a handful of lead-wire air-lock tamper indicators.” Indicators are attached outside the doors to prove nobody has gone in or out.

Rocky Stewart, former senior software engineer on the project, says he heard from several people that several duffel bags were brought in.

Spokesman Winokur, who works for a Los Angeles public relations firm, said the allegation about tamper indicators “is patently ridiculous.”

He said the lead seals on pieces of wire, marked by independent third parties, tear if opened. In addition, he said, glass cases were built around the outside air-lock handles, so anyone breaking the seal would have to break the glass first.

On Dec. 19, SBV’s director of systems engineering, Bill Dempster, acknowledged that 10 days earlier, 600,000 cubic feet of outside air had been pumped in through the system’s “lungs,” or pressure equalization chambers.

He said that was to replace 10% of the air that leaked out of the dome. He also said the additional air had nothing to do with carbon dioxide levels, which had climbed far higher than is normal in the atmosphere, but not, according to SBV, to dangerous levels.

Earlier that month, Hawthorne had predicted that the lungs would be used “for the covert pumping of air.”

SBV’s “background report” early this month also revealed, belatedly, that the crew went in with a three-month supply of food, a two-year supply of dried fruit and monkey food, birdseed for finches and dried nectar for hummingbirds.

Hawthorne contended that they actually had a full year’s supply of food for the crew; Winokur denied it.

SBV has sued Hawthorne, who was hired last year by the University of Phoenix to produce an educational documentary on Biosphere 2.

The university, which has close ties with Biosphere 2, was also a plaintiff in the suit. It charged Hawthorne with theft, misappropriating trade secrets and confidential information, racketeering, unfair competition and breach of contract; it seeks his notes and footage.

Hawthorne maintains that he was sued because he refused to do an entirely positive piece about the project, and because he discussed co-production of a documentary with ABC-TV’s “PrimeTime Live.”

Hawthorne told Associated Press that while working last year at the Biosphere 2 site, he received “a lot of very specific information” which suggested that “the Biosphere’s not what it appears to be.”

He says a test closure in August had to be aborted because carbon dioxide levels soared dangerously high--8,000 to 10,000 parts per million. He says he learned of plans to purchase the carbon dioxide scrubber, and of computer software allegedly “being designed to produce false data.”

Hawthorne says he was told a programmer was ordered to make the software “editable,” that it was done and “at this point, the technology is in place for limitless deception.”

All of these things, Winokur says, are not true.

Stewart, who resigned effective the day after closure, accusing SBV management of “exhibiting a pattern of deception,” said in an interview that software easily could be designed to produce data that can be edited.

Asked whether there had been any effort to tamper with the data, he paused for 15 seconds and then replied, “I’d probably better not comment on that.” Attorneys for SBV had threatened litigation “if I discuss any of the ways that they do business.”

Stewart worked on the project for two years, first as a consultant to Hewlett-Packard, the computer firm that designed its nerve system, sensors program and computer programming system. SBV then hired him as director of monitoring systems, but he chose the title senior software engineer.

His letter of resignation said he was departing because he believed the carbon dioxide problem was “being swept under the CO2 scrubber rather than solved.” He also left because of his lack of faith in management over “false statements” to the media and “false information . . . concerning the capabilities and configuration of the Biosphere.”

Hawthorne says, “I can certainly corroborate from my experience there I saw an ongoing, constant pattern of deception.”

He alleged that the number of sensors to measure such levels as temperature and light was about 500, not the 2,500 claimed by SBV. And he said the seedlings sold in the biosphere’s gift shop as clones of Biosphere 2 plants were instead ordinary ones purchased wholesale from a nursery.

Project spokesman Winokur said he did not know the exact number of sensors in the biosphere and said “some modifications might have been made in number” during construction “but were not done in any way in a deceptive manner.”

And the seedlings?

“All the ‘test tube babies’ were cloned in the plant tissue culture laboratory, grown from genetic stock of plants grown inside Biosphere 2.”