The Wizards of Hokum

By Anastasia Toufexis

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 research: collecting 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!

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles