In addition to our personal wardrobes, we had piles of T-shirts, pants, skirts, and other clothes made of wool which were donated to us by The Wool Bureau, a company that promotes the use of natural wool products. The Wool Bureau liked the Biosphere 2 concept from early in the project, and believed that their products would work well in our tropical world. Their new design actually turned out to be recyclable, biodegradable, and comfortable even in our tropical climate. They also donated our carpets and the brightly colored fabrics on the walls throughout the human habitat area. The walls of the Biosphere 2 Command Room, our semi-circular office and computer/communications hub, were covered by a purple and gray wool fabric; the library walls an azure blue; and each bedroom was a different color of light brown, red, or blue.
Perfume and perfumed soaps or shampoos were not a good idea in the closed, recirculating atmosphere of the Biosphere. First, what they outgassed would confuse the detailed monitoring systems that tracked all the small amounts of trace gases that might be in the air. Moreover, in a closed system, compounds from non-biodegradable soaps or shampoos could easily accumulate to a toxic level. To put it bluntly, if we used a product that was not biodegradable, we’d be drinking it in our tea within a week. That excluded just about every readily available brand of hand soap, dish soap, detergent, and shampoo.
Sally tested many products, squarely facing the difficult task of satisfying both personal preferences and biological requirements. She once managed a hostel for mentally handicapped adults in her native England, and sometimes joked that it was this experience that made her able to survive as co-captain. Unflappably calm amidst the flare-ups of chaotic activity, Sally had been controller and General Manager of the architecture studio for Biosphere 2 during the entire design and construction stage, so settling the soap question was a minor matter for her. The biggest arguments centered around which soap to purchase, and needless to say Sally found a way to satisfy everyone. She included a granulated brand of oatmeal soap that hardly dissolved in water, as well as an oatmeal and wintergreen soap that melted like soap when wet and could actually produce a lather. She stocked milk crates full of lotion, shampoo, conditioner, wintergreen and spearmint toothpaste, and natural sponges, all of which complied with the need to eliminate potentially dangerous gas emitters. Those of us who liked fragrances had to collect them ourselves from our herbs in the farm area and plants in the wilderness zones.
Quantities presented yet another problem: how much of the stuff would we need in two years? Some of us, like Linda Leigh and Gaie (who shared one bathroom), ordinarily used up to two containers of shampoo and conditioner (four ounces each) a week. It seemed unlikely that Roy, who was bald, needed any! Longhaired people needed twice as much shampoo as short-haired Sally or Mark.
There were many such questions to answer before the experiment could begin. What about feminine hygiene? Tampons and pads cannot be recycled, and if four women used these products for two years, the resulting garbage would be difficult to handle. We found an Ohio company called The Keeper that produced a reusable plastic cup designed to catch the menstrual flow. All that had to be done was wash it out. Toothbrushes also aroused controversy. Some dentists recommended twelve toothbrushes; others recommended four to six. In the end, a mix of electric and manual toothbrushes came inside.
Everyone had a thorough dental checkup before coming in, a requirement SBV was very firm about. Our healthcare specialists, Roy Walford, a then sixty-nine-year-old professor of pathology at UCLA Medical School who specialized in life extension; and Taber MacCallum, our youngest crewmember and Roy’s assistant, had both taken the special US Navy course in emergency dentistry designed for use on ships far from land and without an onboard dentist. Their tales of old-fashioned tooth pulling and other dental tortures inspired what was probably some of the most conscientious tooth brushing in the history of dental care! Taber was a qualified deep-sea diver and Manager of the Analytical Laboratory while inside Biosphere 2, but, so far as we know, he had never planned to practice dentistry.
Those with medical problems brought in special equipment. Mark, working on strengthening leg muscles following a knee injury a few years prior, split the cost of a piece of gym equipment for leg presses with Roy. Roy also brought a stationary bicycle, a rowing machine, weights, some isometric equipment, and a couple of braces for a neck problem. Mark included knee braces, heating pads, and electric massagers in his kit. At forty-four the second oldest member of our crew, Mark found that he was beginning to become farsighted. So he came in with two sets of reading glasses—one to start with, and one for his eye doctor’s best guess as to what his eyesight might be after two years.
Since the Biosphere is covered with glass that excludes almost all ultraviolet light, there was no need for sunblock. In fact, we had to take vitamin D pills to make up for the lack of sunlight that the body normally uses to produce its own. We did bring sunglasses, however, because the light could be extremely bright inside; and of course, some used them to look cool.
Another useless item inside was money, although some of it floated in inadvertently in wallets or pockets. There was no money economy inside Biosphere 2. In time, other items came to be used for barter. Eventually, we bartered clothes, time, tools, but not food. Everyone ate their own as food was too precious to trade! Though, sometimes high-stake poker games amongst the crew were played for a handful of shelled peanuts.
ROOM FOR EIGHT
The eight of us were selected from an original group of fourteen biospherian candidates. We were a motley group: five Americans, two Brits, and a Belgian; four men and four women. When Mission One began, our ages ranged from twenty-seven (Taber) to sixty-seven (Roy). We were engineers, scientists, gardeners, and explorers.
Although many of us worked together for several years building the Biosphere, we still came in as eight individuals with unique histories. Gaie Alling, raised on the coasts of Maine and Georgia, experienced sailor and expedition chief, was one of the first marine ecologists to swim with sperm whales. Roy Walford, from California, was a world traveler and avid diver in addition to being the well-known author of The 120 Year Diet and a professor of pathology at UCLA who created four transgenic strains of mice and was one of the world’s authorities on aging. Linda Leigh, raised in Wisconsin, a field ecologist as familiar with temperate ecology as she is with tropical, was our “wild woman naturalist” whose favorite comic book character is Swamp Thing. Laser Van Thillo from Antwerp, Belgium, was trained in industrial mechanics and engineering before heading off to work in India and Central America. Eventually he would board the research vessel Heraclitus; first as diver, and then as Chief Engineer. Jane Poynter’s passion for gardening led her to range and crop studies in the remote Australian outback, where she began to work with domestic farm animals—unusual interests for someone born to the English upper classes. Mark Nelson, originally from Brooklyn, is a founder and Chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics, a small think-tank organization devoted to harmonizing ecology and technology. One of his main concerns for many years has been to bring together space researchers, medical scientists, physical scientists, natural scientists, technologists, and agriculturists from all over the world to work together addressing environmental problems. Sally Silverstone was the resourceful English co-captain whose background, both academic and practical, in social and agricultural problems of underdeveloped countries probably helped us more than we may have ever predicted when the doors first shut behind us. Taber MacCallum, raised in New Mexico, had also been a world traveler, lived in Japan and Egypt, and had been the Chief Diver on the RV Heraclitus during expeditions to explore coral reefs and island cultures around Australia and the Red Sea.
Of course, aside from the differences in experience and professional background, we were all different in temperament, a very ordinary mix of ‘night people’ and ‘day people,’ extroverts and introverts, theorists and practitioners, doers and dreamers—all thrown