John Allen Biography

John Allen is the conceiver, inventor, and co-founder of the Biosphere 2 project and former Executive Chairman and Director of Biospheric Research Development, and Engineering for Space Biospheres Ventures.

Mission One of Biosphere 2 set a number of world records in closed life system work including among others sealing tightness, 100% waste recycle and water recycle, agricultural productivity and sustainability, and time of residence of humans.

Biosphere 2 set a number of world records in closed life system work including, among others, degree of sealing tightness, 100% waste recycle and water recycle, and duration of human residence within a closed system (8 people for two years). Allen began the first manned Biosphere Test Module experiment in September, 1988, residing in the almost fully recyclable closed ecological system environment for three days and setting a world record at that time.

As the Director of Biospheric Development for the project, Allen led the research and engineering necessary to create this vast materially closed life system, as well as the development of spin-off technologies.

Currently the Chairman of Global Ecotechnics Corporation, an international project development and management company with a Biospheres Division, he engages in designing and preparing to build the second generation of advanced materially closed biospheric systems and ecologically enriched biomic systems (www.biospheretechnologies.com) and its EcoFrontiers Division which owns and operates ecological projects of which he was the chief designer in France, Australia, Puerto Rico and England (www.ecotechnics.edu).

Allen also co-founded, with Abigail Alling, and served as Chairman of Planetary Coral Reef Foundation until 2006, a non-profit corporation devoted to mapping and monitoring the health and vitality of coral reefs, and exploring the origins of human cultures aboard the Heraclitus, a special research vessel that he invented in 1974, which has sailed over 200,000 nautical miles around the world (www.rvheraclitus.org).

In the early sixties, he worked on regional development projects with David Lillienthal's Development Resources Corporation in the U.S., Iran, and Ivory Coast, and before that headed a special metals team at Allegheny-Ludlum Steel Corporation which developed over thirty alloys to product status. He has led remote area expeditions studying ecology and cultures, particularly the ecology and early civilizations, located in Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tibet, India, Belize, and the Altiplano, and is a Fellow of the Explorers Club and the Royal Geograhic Society.

An accomplished speaker on Biospherics, Comprehensive Sustainable Design , and Creative Futures, Allen speaks at a variety of international forums on the emerging science of biospherics and the implications of Biosphere 2 for health, environment, science, and culture; and the future expanding role of artificial biospheres as models for sustainable co--evolutionary design for the future on earth and in space. Allen has over two dozen publications to his credit, over one-half of them scientific, the rest poetry, drama, prose, and films under the pen name, Johnny Dolphin.

Allen holds a degree in Metallurgical-Mining Engineering with honors from the Colorado School of Mines, an MBA from the Harvard Business School where he graduated with distinction as a Baker Scholar, and an Engineering Physiology Certificate from the University of Michigan. Before engineering, he studied anthropology, classics, and history at Northwestern, Stanford, and Oklahoma universities and served in the U.S. Army's Engineering Corps.