Robert Lanza

Robert Lanza, MD (born 11 February 1956) is a leading American Scientist and is currently Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Biography

Lanza was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His home life was less than the Norman Rockwell ideal. His father, Samuel Lanza, was a professional gambler who played cards for a living, and none of his three sisters finished high school . Like Emerson and Thoreau -- two of the greatest American Transcendentalists – Lanza’s youth was spent exploring the forested woods of Massachusetts that teemed with life. His understanding of nature began on those journeys. Growing up underprivileged in Stoughton, Massachusetts, south of Boston, the young preteen caught the attention of Harvard Medical School reseachers when he showed up on the university steps having succcesfully altered the genetics of chickens in his basement. Over the next decade, he was "discovered" and taken under the wing of scientific giants such as Jonas Salk, B. F. Skinner, and Christiaan Barnard. Lanza received both BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a University Scholar. Lanza is a former Fulbright Scholar and has been described as "the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting." Lanza currently resides in Clinton, Massachusetts.

Work on stem cells

Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world's first early stage human embryos for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells. In 2001 he was also the first to clone an endangered species (a Gaur), and in 2003, he cloned an endangered wild ox (a Banteng) from the frozen skin cells of an animal that had died at the San Diego Zoo nearly a quarter-of-a-century earlier. Lanza and his colleagues were also the first to demonstrate that nuclear transplantation could be used to reverse the aging process and to generate immune-compatible tissues, including the first organ tissue-engineered from cloned cells.

One of his most recent successes was showing that it is feasible to generate functional oxygen-carrying red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells under conditions suitable for clinical scale-up. The blood cells were comparable to normal transfusable blood and could serve as a potentially inexhaustible source of “universal” blood. Dr. Lanza has also succeeded in getting stem cells to grow into retinal cells. Using this technology some forms of blindness may be curable. His team also discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts – a population of "ambulance" cells - from human embryonic stem cells. In animals, these cells quickly repaired vascular damage, cutting the death rate after a heart attack in half and restoring the blood flow to ischemic limbs that might otherwise have to be amputated.

Recently, Lanza and a team lead by Kwang-Soo Kim at Harvard University reported a safe method for generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Human iPS cells were created from skin cells by direct delivery of proteins, thus eliminating the harmful risks associated with genetic and chemical manipulation. This new method provides a potentially safe source of patient-specific stem cells for translation into the clinic.

However, perhaps his greatest early fame came from his demonstration that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis could be used to generate embryonic stem cells without embryonic destruction.

Awards

Lanza has received numerous awards, including a Rave Award for medicine, and an “All Star” award for biotechnology. Lanza has been called the "Bill Gates of Science. He believes that stem cell technology will have a substantial importance in the future of medicine. According to Discover magazine, “Lanza’s single-minded quest to usher in this new age has paid dividends in scientific insights and groundbreaking discoveries.”

Publications

Lanza has authored books on topics involving tissue engineering, cloning, and stem cells, including the Handbook of Stem Cells and Essentials of Stem Cell Biology, which are considered the definitive references in the field of stem cell research. Others include Principles of Tissue Engineering, Principles of Regenerative Medicine, and One World: The Health & Survival of the Human Species in the 21st Century (with a Foreword by former President and Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter).

In 2007, Lanza published a feature article, "A New Theory of the Universe" in The American Scholar. Lanza's theory places biology above the other sciences in an attempt to solve one of nature’s biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century. Nobel laureate E. Donnall Thomas stated "Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work. The work is a scholarly consideration of science and philosophy that brings biology into the central role in unifying the whole."

This new view has become known as Biocentrism. In biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than external physical objects. Understanding this more fully yields answers to several major puzzles of mainstream science, and offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the double-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe

External links

• Personal website, blog, and archive of books, articles and news, 2007
• Advanced Cell Technology website
• Essentials of Stem Cell Biology