Biosphere 2 as Voyage of Discovery: The Serendipity from Inside

T is currently an ongoing discourse about “the two cultures of ecology,” a discourse not in fact limited to ecology but involving many biologic disciplines: the analytic culture and the integrative culture (Holling 1998). In a number of universities in the United States, the biology departments are being split along these two cultural lines (Roush 1997). Reductionist and experimental, the analytic approach is oriented toward the testing of well-formulated hypotheses. It reflects the traditional, very successful methods of science. The newer integrative approach, on the other hand, attempts to deal with nature on a larger front, where knowledge of the system remains incomplete, surprise is inevitable, prediction is hazardous, and emergent properties may be encountered, springing from the internal nonlinear dynamics of complex systems (Bjernstad and Grenfell 2001). These two approaches are compared in Table 1. Eminent scientists have argued that Biosphere 2—the large, glass-enclosed, complex, and mostly self-sustaining ecological miniworld in the Arizona desert near Tucson—can be considered from the integrative as well as the analytic approach. To cite two examples, H. T. Odum (1996) said,“The self-organizational process of Biosphere 2 was a beautiful living model with which to study aspects of the larger earth by comparison, but when journalists asked establishment scientists, most of whom were small-scale (chemists, biologists, population ecologists), they got back the small-scale dogma that system-scale experiments are not science”; and W. S. Broecker (1996, p. 1) stated, “Because the cost [of Biosphere 2] approached $150 million, no chance exists that this wonderfully engineered vision will ever be duplicated. I considered it a tragedy that this incredible facility was being used to accomplish what I viewed to be a frivolous goal. Maintaining eight people in a matter-sealed environment for a period of two years was a clever stunt, but then what? ” I would argue for an integrative approach specifically related to and illustrated by Biosphere 2, a viewpoint reflecting my personal experience as crew member and “inside” physician for the project from 1991 to 1993 (Walford et al. 1996). Indeed, the title of this article,“Biosphere 2 as Voyage of Discovery,” expresses the idea that serendipity may play a dominant role in directing inquiry. A pertinent historical example is Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle. When Darwin joined the crew as naturalist, he was not a well-known scientist; he was chosen in part because, having no strong ties holding him to one place, he could absent himself for 4 or 5 years. But he didn’t know exactly where he was going or what he might expect to find there, and he had no hypothesis to test. He was merely a thinker– observer—of course, an astonishingly good one—on a long, eventful voyage. The voyage of the Beagle turned out to provide serendipitous science aplenty, wherein nature poses unsolicited questions, the answers to which may lead to new insights—questions such as, Why are the beaks of those finches subtly different from island to island? Dilemmas like this may be considered experiments of nature. They arise in complex systems, unpredictably. They can easily be overlooked or passed off as annoyances (Cohen and Tilman 1996). Did the voyage of Biosphere 2 also throw open opportunities for serendipitous science? Yes, indeed, and no doubt in more ways than the crew were able to grasp, since our primary task was to keep Biosphere 2 alive and functioning. We had 2 years to iron out the kinks in the “incredible facility” (Broecker 1996) we had built. Having participated in everything from construction work to sophisticated computer in-