Biosphere 2's owner shopping for a buyer

ORACLE, Ariz. — As for-sale listings go, this one is a real fixer-upper: a 10-bedroom, 5 ½-bath glass house in Arizona's Sonoran Desert.

The landscaping is lush, but a bit overgrown. (Truth be told, it's a real jungle.) There's a million-gallon pool, but the water is more than slightly brackish. The utility bills are a bear, about $1 million a year. And the place is infested with five species of cockroaches and overrun with ants.

But if you're looking for a one-of-a-kind property set amid nearly 1,300 acres of cactus and tumbleweeds with spectacular mountain views, the 137,000-square-foot Biosphere 2 might be for you.

This outsize glass terrarium, you may recall, was the place where eight scientists locked themselves inside in 1991 and lived for two years in hermetically sealed isolation, seeking to discover whether humans could replicate the ecology of Biosphere 1 — Earth — inside a bubble, grow all their own food and survive without help from the outside world.

Biosphere 2 was billed, at the time, as a bold scientific experiment and a test run for the kind of self-sufficient human space colony that would be needed on a mission to Mars. But when the oxygen ran low and food grew scarce, it turned out the seal wasn't so hermetic after all: Extra air was secretly pumped in and the scientists started eating seeds they had stored for an emergency.

Then the Biospherians fell to feuding, splitting into two rival tribes that, to this day, do not speak to one another.

What started out as high science ended up more like an episode of "Survivor," without the million-dollar prize. The project was derided in the media as a stunt and the science dismissed as junk.

The last researchers to use the facility, from New York's Columbia University, pulled out two years ago, leaving the vast complex empty except for millions of insects, a few hundred fish and the few tourists who make the 40-minute drive from Tucson each day to pay $19.95 to wander through the humid interior.

Now Edward Bass, the Texas oil billionaire who built Biosphere 2 for $150 million, is putting the place up for sale. No asking price has been revealed, but the real-estate agents marketing the facility tout its potential as a "spa and wellness center," a "corporate campus" or a "high-security compound."

However you describe the property, don't call it a white elephant, Biosphere 2's boosters insisted. "It's an exceptional opportunity," said Jerry Hawkins, one of the real-estate agents at CB Richard Ellis in Tucson who snagged the unusual listing.

The biggest opportunity might well be the land on which the unusual buildings sit. Metropolitan Tucson is rapidly spreading northeast. A sprawling new retirement community now neighbors the facility to the south, and developers would love to snag the Biosphere 2 property for residential use.

But Hawkins said Bass, whose representatives declined interviews, does not want to see his beloved science project turned into the world's biggest teardown. Some kind of research use, even if it's combined with a spa or golf club, is the desired outcome, Hawkins said.

That could be a hard sell, however, given Biosphere 2's checkered scientific past. From the red designer jumpsuits worn by the Biospherians to their communal ways and vegetarian diets, the project had a touchy-feely New Age dimension that provoked skepticism from many hard-science traditionalists.

The project's legitimacy took a sharper hit later on, when Biosphere 2 managers tried to cover up the bad news mounting under the glass. The Biospherians' crops began to fail from a lack of natural light, and plants and animal species started dying after oxygen levels plummeted. Ants and cockroaches, however, thrived.

At their lowest point, the scientists inside were gasping for breath between every sentence, squabbling over dwindling food and frantically chasing the cockroaches so they could feed them to their emaciated chickens. By the end, the Biospherians had lost an average of 13.5 percent of their body weight.

"We were all starving and suffocating, so it was hard not to be crabby," said Linda Leigh, 53, one of the original Biospherians who is now an administrator at an area college. "It was awful. We went in as friends, thinking we knew each other really well. We ended up in horrible fights over how much time and resources we had and how to use them."

"The psychology of this long-term isolation was some of the most interesting stuff to come out Biosphere 2," said Taber MacCallum, 40, another of the original Biospherians.

Despite the facility's problems, former Biospherians insisted their project was a resounding scientific success. Valuable research was performed, they said, including important findings about the effects of global warming and the loss of oxygen in supposedly "closed" systems.

It turned out, for example, that the concrete foundation of the Biosphere 2 structure was absorbing carbon dioxide and throwing plant photosynthesis off balance, a discovery, MacCallum said, that was of particular interest to NASA, which had been contemplating using concrete to build human outposts in space.

Most valuable of all, the scientists said, was the humbling reminder Biosphere 2 provided of the enormous complexity of Earth's natural ecosystems and how elusive is humankind's quest to replicate them.

"If we can't understand how an ecosystem works that is relatively simple and confined," MacCallum said, "how do we ever hope to understand how our Earth works?"