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The Human Experiment

Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2

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By Jane Poynter

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Jane Poynter

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Life in Biosphere 2

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The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 Hardcover – 17 Aug. 2006

It's a story that has never been told ... until now. Imagine being sealed into a closed environment for two years -- cut off from the outside world with only seven other people -- enduring never-ending hunger, severely low levels of oxygen, and extremely difficult relationships. Crew members struggled to survive in Biosphere 2, where they swore nothing would go in or out -- no food or water, not even air -- all in the name of science. For the first time, biospherian Jane Poynter -- who lived and loved in the Biosphere -- is ready to share what really happened in there. She takes readers on a riveting, fast-paced trip through shattered lives, scientific discovery, cults, love, fears of insanity, and inspiring human endurance. The eight biospherians who closed themselves into the Biosphere emerged 730 days later... much wiser, thinner, and having done what many had said was impossible.

• ISBN-10 156025775X
• ISBN-13 978-1560257752
• Publisher Basic Books
• Publication date 17 Aug. 2006
• Language English
• Dimensions 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
• Print length 384 pages
• See all details

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Jake Page is a science editor and writer, novelist, and essayist who has collaborated with scientists and others on thirty books of non-fiction, most recently The Big One (Houghton-Mifflin) with geologist Charles Officer and, before that, The First Americans (Random House) with archaeologist James M. Adovasio. He was editor of Natural History and science editor of Smithsonian . He lives in Lyons, Colorado.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (17 Aug. 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 156025775X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1560257752
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
• 1,063 in Popular Science Weather
• 1,798 in Experiments, Instruments & Measurements
• 2,025 in Earth Sciences & Geography References

About the author

Jane poynter.

Jane Poynter is one of only eight people ever in history to live sealed in an artificial world for two years. Jane's preparation for Biosphere 2 involved training to survive in the Australian Outback and onboard a concrete research boat in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. She was part of the Biosphere from the start, ultimately managing the farm where the crew grew its food.

She is now President of Paragon Space Development Corporation, an aerospace firm that she co-founded with fellow biospherian, Taber MacCallum, while inside Biosphere 2. Since leaving the project, Jane has had experiments flown on the International Space Station, the Russian Mir Space Station, and the U.S. Space Shuttle. Currently, she and Paragon are developing life support systems for astronauts and Navy deep-sea divers - and Jane recently started The Carbon Company, which consults on international environmental projects.

Jane and Taber married a year after exiting Biosphere 2. They live in Tucson, Arizona, where they race motorcycles on weekends.

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The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 Hardcover – Aug. 18 2006

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• Print length 384 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Basic Books
• Publication date Aug. 18 2006
• Dimensions 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
• ISBN-10 156025775X
• ISBN-13 978-1560257752
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; American First edition (Aug. 18 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 156025775X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1560257752
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 549 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
• #385 in Meteorology Books
• #507 in Weather in Earth Sciences
• #527 in Rivers

About the author

Jane poynter.

Jane Poynter is one of only eight people ever in history to live sealed in an artificial world for two years. Jane's preparation for Biosphere 2 involved training to survive in the Australian Outback and onboard a concrete research boat in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. She was part of the Biosphere from the start, ultimately managing the farm where the crew grew its food.

She is now President of Paragon Space Development Corporation, an aerospace firm that she co-founded with fellow biospherian, Taber MacCallum, while inside Biosphere 2. Since leaving the project, Jane has had experiments flown on the International Space Station, the Russian Mir Space Station, and the U.S. Space Shuttle. Currently, she and Paragon are developing life support systems for astronauts and Navy deep-sea divers - and Jane recently started The Carbon Company, which consults on international environmental projects.

Jane and Taber married a year after exiting Biosphere 2. They live in Tucson, Arizona, where they race motorcycles on weekends.

Customer reviews

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The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2

Constructed between 1987 and 1989 and costing more than $200 million, Biosphere 2 was an experiment to test if and how people could create, live, and work inside a closed biosphere while carrying out scientific experiments. It explored the possible use of closed biospheres in space colonization, and also allowed the study and manipulation of a biosphere without harming our own. Problems plagued the experiment from the beginning–lack of oxygen, low food supply, and psychological problems such as hostility and paranoia led to an early end of the experiment. Was it a success or a failure? What lessons were learned that can be used in either space travel or to create a more sustainable community on Earth?

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Jane Poynter was one of the eight people sealed inside Biosphere 2 for two years, and her preparation for that experiment included ecological and survival training in the Australian Outback, sailing a concrete boat across the Indian Ocean, and diving on a shark breeding ground in the Red Sea. While inside the Biosphere, Jane co-founded Paragon Space Development Corporation, which designs spacecrafts as well as developing life support systems for astronauts and Navy deep sea divers. Jane has had experiments in self-sustaining habitats flown on the International Space Station, the Russian Mir Space Station, and the US Space Shuttle. Paragon is currently using their Biosphere 2 and aerospace expertise toward the design of “green” buildings.

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The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, by Jane Poynter

Review by Catherine Cheek

Jane Poynter was born to a proper English family and had a conventional public school upbringing, but all of that changed when she met John Allen in 1982. He introduced her to a group of idealistic adventurers who would eventually form the corp of the Biosphere 2 project. John was looking for people who had good synergy, fearless people who could do a number of tasks well, and endure hardship for the sake if ideals. To prove herself, Poynter sailed around the world in a concrete junk, worked on a cattle station in the outback, and travelled internationally with a theater troupe. After proving herself willing to overcome any obstacle and withstand any hardship, Jane made the final cut on the team, and became captain of Agriculture in Biosphere 2, overseeing the crops of sweet potatoes, peanuts, and other foodstuffs which sustained them during their two year term of isolation.

What I liked most about this book were the insider anecdotes. For example, the crew had such a huge problem with roaches that they had to catch them by using cups smeared with KY jelly as traps. Mites ate their potatoes, ants chewed through the silicone, and they had to make two species extinct (poisonous stowaway bark scorpions, and their domestic pigs, who ate too much human grade food.) Algal blooms threatened the coral reef in their ocean, mildew on the glass blocked out the sun, and food shortages made them all weaker, even as the beta carotene from their main staple—sweet potatoes—turned their skin orange. They also had to account for several metric tons of oxygen that mysteriously vanished, leaving them weak and lethargic.

Worse than the physical hardships were the human problems. Poynter complained about the huge media storm that followed every decision, even one as simple as allowing her to leave to get hand surgery when a thresher amputated her finger. Big projects attract big personalities, and conflicts between the choleric John Allen and the others on the project eventually tore them apart. By the end of their two year term, the once close-knit group had severed into two factions Us and Them (as Poynter called them) who refused to speak with each other.

Although they managed to get the carbon and oxygen fluctuations under control, and the internal ecosystem eventually settled into equilibrium, they never resolved how to keep people in isolation for two years without having psychological distress. Five years after their mission, they still had the record for the longest time spent in voluntary isolation, which Poynter attributes to the fact that they were pre-selected individuals, screened to only include outgoing adventurous types with an extremely low predilection for depression.

The method by which the crew was selected, although effective, proved controversial. Allen appointed and fired people as heads of departments capriciously. Poynter, who was in charge of agriculture and at one point was also in charge of entomology, had no scientific background at all. She had the equivalent of a high school diploma, along with a year or so at secretarial school. Only two of the crew had advanced degrees, despite the fact that they were all involved in highly technical positions. This caused the press to decry the project as unscientific. Poynter argued that they were not scientists, they were skilled technicians and managers. Their group, the synergists, judged people by how well they did their jobs, not by how qualified they were. Ironically, while the project made significant scientific discoveries, it eventually crumbled due to incompetent management and had to be forcibly taken over by an outside organization.

While Poynter prided herself on being able to “learn by doing” and succeed at any task she set her mind to, I wish she had made an exception and hired a professional ghost writer to help her with this book. While the prose is fine at the sentence and paragraph level, it broke down on a macro scale. She began many chapters by describing a scene, only to segue into something unrelated. Poynter described people who later proved unimportant to the Biosphere 2 story, while neglecting to describe her fellow crew members. It was only by the end of the book that I could remember whether John and Margaret were actually within the Biosphere dome, and with the exception of her husband Taber, I didn’t have a sense of the personalities, roles, or even physical characteristics of the rest of the crew.

Poynter started out writing what appeared to be an autobiography, spending an entire chapter on her rather staid and uninteresting upbringing. But all that changed when she walked into the “October Gallery” and got introduced to the Institute of Ecotechnics. Poynter did not explain what an art gallery had to do with a theater troupe, or what either of those had to do with the IE. At this point in the book Poynter bombarded the reader with pages and pages of names, most of whom had little relevance to the story. She mentioned “Caravan of Dreams” and “Galactic Conference” and “Quanbun Downs” and names of people and their projects, but she didn’t go into many details, leaving the reader confused as to what a bohemian theater group had to do with a quarter-billion-dollar scientific project. So many of her references were for things left unexplained in the book that it felt as though she were relaying inside jokes and stories, or as though I were hearing half a telephone conversation.

About a hundred pages into the book, Poynter revealed with horror how devastated they had been when the media called them a cult. I laughed out loud. After all, this group of hippies had been working for practically nothing, under the dictatorial direction of a charismatic leader, enduring hardships for the sake of their ideals. They’d eaten together, lived together, meditated twice a week together, and even had renounced their own names in favor of nicknames the group gave them. Poynter spent several pages indignantly denouncing the suggestion that they were a cult, and described how hurtful and wrong this was. This felt to me as ridiculous as someone spending a hundred pages describing obsessive calorie-counting, fasting, and purging, then getting huffy when accused of having an eating disorder. The spade was a spade. Although I believe that the Biosphere 2 project was a very valuable contribution to science, especially to the study of the ecology, Poynter admits the flaws in their controls. Not only did they have to twice pump in oxygen (to compensate for that which was stolen by the un-sealed concrete) but they began exchanging sealed vials of air and water with the outside world for testing. During these exchanges, outside project members smuggled in alcohol and other treats. Poynter defended these as a huge boost to morale, but having the crew supplement their meager rations with M&Ms or Jack Daniels made the line between controlled experiment and expensive performance art project even fuzzier.

The book needed more focus. It couldn’t quite decide if it was Poynter’s autobiography, an overview of the Biosphere 2 project, or a memoir of being with John Allen and the synergists. I liked reading about the technical aspects of Biosphere 2, but wanted more detail as to the planning and the politics. If you’re entranced by the Biosphere 2 project and want to read something about it, this isn’t a bad introduction. It is by no means comprehensive, and if you want to learn all there is to know about the Biosphere 2 project, you’ll want to follow up with the books written by the other members who will no doubt contradict everything Poynter wrote.

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Princeton University Library Catalog

The human experiment : two years and twenty minutes inside biosphere 2 / jane poynter., availability, copies in the library.

• Biosphere 2 (Project) [Browse]
• Ecology — Research [Browse]
• Ch. 1. Oxygen dilemma
• Ch. 2. A ratified atmosphere
• Ch. 3. Ecopreneur
• Ch. 4. Sea change
• Ch. 5. Extreme training
• Ch. 6. Building a new world
• Ch. 7. Vertebrate X, Y, and Z
• Ch. 8. The tallest nail gets hammered down
• Ch. 9. Closure
• Ch. 10. What honeymoon?
• Ch. 11. The long dark winter
• Ch. 12. Cabin fever
• Ch. 13. It takes four months to make a pizza
• Ch. 14. Gold or lead
• Ch. 15. Lines drawn in desert sand
• Ch. 16. Starving, suffocating, and going quite mad
• Ch. 17. I dreamed of wild horses
• Ch. 18. Dysfunctional family
• Ch. 19. Window-shopping
• Ch. 20. Are we there yet?
• Ch. 21. Reentry
• Ch. 22. Thirty-seven brands of ketchup
• Ch. 23. April fools
• Ch. 24. And now what?
• 9781560257752

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Author Interviews

Conflict, difficulties marked life in 'biosphere ii'.

Jane Poynter spent more than two years living in "Biosphere II" in the early 1990s. Her book about the experience is The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes inside Biosphere Two . Poynter speaks with Scott Simon about her time locked inside the structure.

Human Experiment

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The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2

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It's a story that has never been told -- until now. Imagine being sealed into a closed environment for two years -- cut off from the outside world with only seven other people -- enduring never-ending hunger, severely low levels of oxygen, and extremely difficult relationships. Crew members struggled to survive in Biosphere 2, where they swore nothing would go in or out -- no food or water, not even air -- all in the name of science. For the first... Read Full Overview

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Poynter's life before, during and after living in a fishbowl - fascinating, amazing book, captivating, interesting, well told., the inside story of the biosphere 2, behind the scenes story about biosphere 2, very engrossing and of broad appeal., popular categories.

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It's Been 25 Years Since 8 Scientists Sealed Themselves Inside Biosphere 2 For Two Whole Years

Multimedia Editor, The Huffington Post UK

It's been a quarter of a century since eight scientists volunteered to shut themselves inside the world's largest science laboratory in the middle of the desert.

Little did they know the amount of publicity their mission would generate. The whole world watched as the four men and four women entered the 3.14-acre structure in the middle of the Sonora Desert in Arizona.

"It was an extraordinarily audacious idea," Jane Poynter, one of the human guinea pigs who took part in the experiment reminisces. "We were attempting to take this biosphere that evolved on a planetary scale and reduce it in size and complexity so we could understand more about our planet.

"And to do that was the most exciting thing I could possibly have gotten involved with at the time."

Poynter, who spent her 30th birthday inside B2, had been on the design team, working on the project for years before she was handpicked as one of the select few.

"The day we went in was a culmination of years of all our work," she says.

The training programme she describes as "unorthodox but quite effective". Poynter was sent off to the wild outback in Australia, and spent a year with Aboriginals.

"It was awesome, riding around on horseback, mending fences, doing cool ecological work. Parts of the year you were completely cut off because of floods. So you really get a sense of what it’s like to be cut off from the world."

Another project included being on a boat which sailed the Indian Ocean.

"It was a dream come true for me, but for some people it wasn’t. They were like ‘oh no, no, this isn’t for me’. So it was these two projects that were a large part of sorting the wheat from the chaff of people who could really thrive in that kind of setting."

Poynter eventually entered the sealed artificial world on September 26, 1991, along with medical doctor and researcher Roy Walford, Taber MacCallum - whom she later married - Mark Nelson, Sally Silverstone, Abigail Alling - who replaced Silke Schneider - Mark Van Thillo, and Linda Leigh.

The project hit headlines across the world.

"We were completely taken by surprise by the amount of publicity," Poynter recalls. "Totally unprepared for that amount of publicity. I just didn’t read it, I ignored it. I just went and grew my sweet potatoes.

"You have to put this in historic context. When we started building B2, we were spelling the word 'biosphere' to people. It wasn’t even a concept then. It wasn’t something people had thought about.

"When we went into the biosphere, we were really just hoping that it was possible to do."

Living in the Biosphere was "a bit like living in a ship," Poynter says.

"We got up in the morning and everyone had their roles. So I was in charge of the farm. Everyone would come and help for a couple of hours in the morning, grow our food, harvest our food. I would work in the lab for several hours in the afternoon."

The agricultural system in the lab produced 83% of the crew's total diet, which included crops of bananas, papayas, sweet potatoes, beets, peanuts, lablab and cowpea beans, rice, and wheat. No chemicals could be used.

"It was very varied. I mean, we had a whole planet to manage. We were recycling all our water, all our air, growing all our food. Nothing was going in or out, it was truly hermetically sealed.

"The building was sealed tighter than the ISS. That’s how tight it was. It was incredible."

During their time on the mission, the crew were subjected to severely low levels of oxygen, never-ending hunger and infighting. The team split into two warring factions, each with different ideas of what the project should be trying to achieve.

"I was very naive about how hard the human interaction part would be," Poynter, who is back at Biosphere 2 for the One Young World environmental summit, admits. "And possibly hadn’t really thought about it in the way that I should have. Certainly the human component was not as easy as I was hoping. We were a bunch of type As, so you can imagine.."

The project was dogged by controversy and bad press. The mission was accused of being "New Age drivel masquerading as science," while the participants were accused of being in a cult. In 1992, the hungry scientists started eating emergency food supplies that had not been grown inside the bubble. Levels of CO2 fluctuated "wildly" and many of the pollinating insects died. Oxygen levels fell, meaning some biospherians started to suffer from sleep apnea and fatigue, as the conditions were akin to being at 13,400ft. The medical team eventually decided to boost oxygen with injections.

There was added controversy when the public learnt one injured team member had been allowed to leave for treatment, and returned with external materials - although the crew maintains only plastic bags were brought inside.

Nevertheless, the team completed the mission, emerging into the outside world after two years of solitude in September 26, 1993.

"What was weird was actually coming out of the Biosphere," Poynter explains. "We’d been in there for two years, we’ve recycled everything, we know where all our food comes from, and all of a sudden it smacked us in the face the day we came out.

"The first thing that happens is I’m dying to see all my friends and family, and I run over and I give them a big hug. And then I pull away in disgust because we all stink out here. We stink of chemicals.

"But," she continues, "you get over that pretty quickly.

"The second thing was we had a party that evening and we had a bunch of people over. I walk out the next morning and there is this gigantic pile of garbage. And we hadn’t had any garbage in the biosphere, we recycled everything. And then you go to a store to buy stuff, and you’re like ‘holy cow, look at this’.

"There’s not only tomato ketchup, there’s like 17 brands of it! And look at the cheese from France!

"You look at all these pastries and you want to throw yourself in there, and just roll around because it just looks so scrumptious. You know it’s like, the abundance of this world, that we all take so for granted became so apparent [after B2]. It really smacked me in the face when we came out."

"It also became apparent how difficult it is, truly, to live that kind of lifestyle we were living in Biosphere 2."

I ask Poynter how many of the habits she adopted in the Biosphere have remained in her life. She pauses, contemplating, then tells me: "Mostly I try to live a life with as low a carbon footprint as possible. But I certainly think about it a lot."

If anything, Poynter says life inside the closed ecosystem taught her the value of food. One experience, in particular, sticks in her mind.

"How do you make a pizza?", she asks me, before answering the question herself: "You pick up the phone, you say ‘hey, I want a pizza’, a few minutes later, you get your pizza.

"In Biosphere 2, we would have to plant the wheat, which would take about 120 days to grow, so there’s four months right there.

"And then we’d harvest the wheat, grind the wheat, turn it into flour, and turn it into the dough for the bottom. That’s just part of it, now you’ve got to put everything on top of it.

"In order to get the cheese, it doesn’t just fall out of the sky. We had to have goats, that have been inseminated, have had kids, so now they’re giving milk, we take that milk and we turn it into cheese, and then every now and then the goats have to keep giving birth, so they keep giving milk." She pauses for breath, before summarising: "That’s the cycle, that’s why it takes so long, because you have to get the goat pregnant in order to make your cheese."

After a pause, Poynter laughs, adding: "I have to admit, pizza’s not my favorite food. I actually really missed chocolate."

Regardless of what went wrong in the experiment, the mission taught the crew members the fragile relationship between humans and their environment.

"One of the most extraordinary experiences was when you are enclosed in a system like that, it really is like planet Earth, it’s in miniature.

"And on a day by day basis I was very aware that the Biosphere, the plants, the algae in there, were providing me with my oxygen, and I was providing them with their carbon dioxide. It was this incredible interdependency. It's like that on planet Earth, but it’s so big you don’t realise it, or think about it."

The two years were also a fascinating glimpse into human behaviour, into what happens when people are forced to cohabit in a confined area.

"A lot of studies have been done on that," Poynter says. "If you have a small group of people you have to be careful who you choose. It was really interesting, we did have issues when we were in there but it’s the same kind of issues people have in the Antarctic, or the space station, things like that.

"There’s a constellation of things that occur in isolation and confined environments. What’s really fascinating, and I’d love to see studies done on this, is I wonder how much that is based on Western society and the way we think.

"Because the second crew had exactly the same kind of issues as we did, they broke up in warring factions, people had a bit of depression.

"But there was one person from the Himalayas, he was Nepalese, and could not understand what all the fuss was about. He had grown up in a small village, cut off for parts of the year, so people had to learn to get along.

"It’s a very different way of being in the world. I thought it was really fascinating. It’s anecdotal, not exactly an experiment, but fascinating nevertheless."

I ask her whether she would ever go back for another mission and she answers without hesitating.

"Oh yes, if there was a real reason.

"For many years I’ve been extremely excited about the notion of exploration in other planets. Not to leave the planet, but to expand from the planet. And that’s incredibly exciting to me. So sure, for that kind of thing, I absolutely would."

Jane Poynter was speaking at the first One Young World expert event , which focused on the environment and allowed young leaders to come together with world experts to create solutions to tackle one of our most pressing global problems.

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• Blue Origin Successfully Landed Its 8th Crewed Flight

Twenty-one-year-old Karsen Kitchen broke the record for crossing the Kármán Line for a few minutes. Two years into it, space tourism has evolved into three very different categories.

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Kitchen, 21, became the youngest woman to ever cross the Kármán line. “I have so many memories of going outside when I was younger, looking up at the night sky. I would come in and be like ‘Y’all, I want to be an astronaut,'” said Kitchen, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after the flight. “It feels unreal. I still feel like I really haven’t processed it all.” Rob Ferl also became the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment on plants as part of a commercial suborbital space crew.

“That is just one of the cleanest flights I’ve seen from this rocket,” said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s launch commentator, after the capsule landed in the west Texas desert. Kitchen’s father, Jim Kitchen , a professor at UNC, had been a passenger on the New Shepard 20 flight in 2022. He was waiting for his daughter after the capsule landed.

The successful mission was originally scheduled the same day as the Polaris Dawn mission, which was scrubbed two days in a row, first because of a helium leak outside the rocket, and then because of the explosion of a separate Falcon 9 rocket booster during landing on Thursday. The FAA ordered SpaceX to pause operations while it investigates.  

In the last two years, space tourism has evolved into three types . SpaceX is in its own category. Isaacman and other billionaires have reserved slots on future space flights, paying astronomical sums for much longer, complicated, and potentially dangerous missions.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are competing for volume with 10- to 12-minute flights above the Kármán Line, which is 62 miles above the Earth and considered the boundary with space. It’s unclear how much Blue Origin is charging for individual seats on its flights, but Virgin Galactic reportedly charges $450,000. The final flight aboard its Unity spaceplane took place on June 8, 2004. In two years, Virgin plans to introduce new Delta-class vehicles that could eventually deliver 125 spaceflights per year. Virgin said the average ticket price will be $600,000.

The space-balloon category will potentially have the largest number of competitors. So far, U.S. and European firms such as Space Perspective , Zephalto , World View , and EOS-X are designing space balloons with capsules for about eight people that travel at about 12 mph on both ascent and descent, with the ability to see the planet’s curve and the darkness of space. These flights do not approach the Kármán Line, though the companies argue their passengers have a slower, more pleasant experience. Prices start at $150,000 per seat, with expectations, according to Space Perspective’s cofounder Jane Poynter, that those could come down to $50,000 once the industry is established.

Blue Origin has not announced the scheduling of its next flight.

Read More On:

• Blue Origin
• New Shepard
• space tourism

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