1987 First International Biospherics Workshop
IE organizes the First International Workshop on Biospherics and Closed Ecological Systems at the Royal Society in London. The second meeting was held in Moscow and Krasnoyarsk, Siberia in 1989 in collaboration with the Institute of Biomedical Problems, Moscow and the Siberian Institute of Biophysics. The third was hosted at the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona in 1992.
Royal Society, London, 1987: first conference on Biospherics and Closed Ecological Systems: at podium left, Josef Gitelson, director of Bios-3 and the Institute of Biophysics, Krasnoyarsk; seated from left: Margaret Augustine, CEO and co-designer, Biosphere 2, Ganna Meleshka, pioneer in closed systems, IBMP; Clair Folsome, University of Hawaii, created first laboratory closed ecospheres and served on Biosphere 2 Project Review Committee, Bill Knott, head of the NASA Breadboard Project, Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Standing on right: Mark Nelson, chairing the conference, and asking question from audience: Roy Walford, UCLA Medical School and Chief Medical Officer, Biosphere 2 closure experiment, 1991-1993.
1987 First International Biospherics Workshop We had a stellar group of speakers at the “International Review of the History, Current Work and Future of Closed Ecological Systems” held in the Wellcome Lecture Room of the Royal Society. Josef Gitelson and Henry Lisovsky, the chief plant specialist at Bios-3, came as did as did Ganna Meleshko and Vladimir Sychev from IBMP. From NASA, Mel Averner, the head of the CELSS program and Bill Knott who ran their Breadboard food production unit at Kennedy Space Center. We also had some renowned ecologists, Ramon Margalef from the University of Barcelona. H.T. Odum, the founder of ecological engineering from the University of Florida, Walter Orr Roberts from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.
Speakers from Biosphere 2 included Margaret Augustine, CEO and co-designer, John Allen, Linda Leigh who was in charge of our wilderness species accessions, Carl Hodges, head of the Environmental Research Lab at the University of Arizona, whose team was helping do general engineering and the agricultural system and Prof. Roy Walford, from the UCLA School of Medicine, who would head our medical program from inside.
The final session was on future lunar and Mars applications of closed ecological systems and included Prof. Keith Runcorn, from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Jim Head, from Brown University, and Michael Duke, head of Solar System exploration at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.
1987 conference participants at the Greenwich Meridian Line.