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Robert Lanza, M.D. (born 11 February 1956) is a 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, and grew up south of there, in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Lanza altered the genes of chickens in his basement, and came to the attention of Harvard Medical School researchers when he appeared at the university with his results. Jonas Salk, B. F. Skinner, and Christiaan Barnard mentored Lanza over the next ten years. Lanza attended University of Pennsylvania, receiving BA and MD degrees. There, he was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a University Scholar. Lanza was a Fulbright Scholar. A cover story in U.S. News & World Report described Lanza as "the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting." Lanza currently resides in Clinton, Massachusetts.

Scientific contributions

Work on stem cells

Lanza being interviewed by Barbara Walters.

Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world's first early stage human embryos for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells. Lanza demonstrated that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis could be used to generate embryonic stem cells without embryonic destruction.

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 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 grown in the laboratory from cloned cells.

Lanza showed 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 could potentially serve as a source of “universal” blood.

His team 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 required amputatation.

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.

Clinical trials for blindness

Dr. Lanza’s team has succeeded in getting stem cells to grow into retinal cells. Using this technology some forms of blindness may be curable, including macular degeneration and Stargardt disease, a currently untreatable form eye disease that causes blindness in teenagers and young adults.

Lanza’s company – Advanced Cell Technology - is seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration for human trials using human embryonic stem cells to treat degenerative eye diseases. This treatment for eye disease uses stem cells to re-create a type of cell in the retina that supports the photoreceptors needed for vision. These cells, called retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), are often the first to die off in age-related macular degeneration and other eye diseases, which in turn leads to loss of vision. Several years ago, Lanza’s team found that human embryonic stem cells could be a source of RPE cells, and subsequent studies found that these cells could restore vision in animal models of macular degeneration.

In recent studies, the same team of researchers showed that their stem-cell therapy provides a long-term benefit in animal models of vision loss. The retinal cells achieved near normal function in animals that otherwise would have gone blind.

Biocentrism

In 2007, Lanza published a feature article, "A New Theory of the Universe" in The American Scholar. Lanza's theory –called biocentrism– 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. In this view, current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness.

In biocentrism, what we call space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than external physical objects. Lanza argues that biocentrism offers insight into several major puzzles of science, including Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the double-slit experiment, and into the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe as we perceive it. Above all, according an article in Discover, an adaption of Lanza's book, “biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago.”

Lanza's article and book on "biocentrism" has received a mixed reception. David Thompson, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said that Lanza's “work is a wake-up call.” Nobel laureate (Physiology or Medicine) E. Donnall Thomas stated that "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." Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss stated “It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science." Wake Forest University scientist Anthony Atala stated "This new theory is certain to revolutionize our concepts of the laws of nature for centuries to come." In USAToday Online, astrophysicist and science writer David Lindley asserted that Lanza’s concept was a "...vague, inarticulate metaphor..." and stated that "...I certainly don't see how thinking his way would lead you into any new sort of scientific or philosophical insight. That's all very nice, I would say to Lanza, but now what?" Daniel Dennett, a Tufts University philosopher, said he did not think the concept meets the standard of a philosophical theory. "It looks like an opposite of a theory, because he doesn't explain how it consciousness happens at all. He's stopping where the fun begins." Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University pointed out that Lanza's theory is consistent with quantum mechanics, “What Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do NOT say it––or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private––furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no!” Indian physician and writer Deepak Chopra stated “Lanza's insights into the nature of consciousness [are] original and exciting” and that “his theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world. It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence."

Awards

Lanza has received numerous awards, including a Rave Award for medicine, and an “All Star” award for biotechnology. 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 articles and books on topics involving tissue engineering, cloning, stem cells, and world health, 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).

Books

• 1984 Heart Transplantation: The Present Status of Orthotopic and Heterotopic Heart Transplantation ISBN 0-85200-862-7
• 1985 Medical Science and the Advancement of World Health ISBN 0-03-071734-5
• 1994 Pancreatic Islet Transplantation: Volume I Procurement of Pancreatic Islets ISBN 1-57059-133-4
• 1994 Pancreatic Islet Transplantation: Volume II Immunomodulation of Pancreatic Islets ISBN 1-57059-134-2
• 1994 Pancreatic Islet Transplantation: Volume III Immunoisolation of Pancreatic Islets ISBN 1-57059-135-0
• 1996 One World: The Health and Survival of the Human Species in the 21st Century ISBN 0-929173-33-3
• 1996 Yearbook of Cell and Tissue Transplantation ISBN 0-7923-3844-8
• 1997 Principles of Tissue Engineering ISBN 1-57059-342-6
• 1999 Cell Encapsulation Technology and Therapeutics ISBN 0-8176-4010
• 2000 Xeno: The Promise of Transplanting Animal Organs into Humans ISBN 0-19-512833-8
• 2000 Principles of Tissue Engineering, Second Edition ISBN 0-12-436630-9
• 2002 Methods of Tissue Engineering ISBN 0-12-436636-8
• 2002 Principles of Cloning ISBN 0-12-174597-X
• 2004 Handbook of Stem Cells: Volume 1 Embryonic Stem Cells ISBN 0-12-436642-2
• 2004 Handbook of Stem Cells: Volume 2 Adult and Fetal Stem Cells ISBN 0-12-436644-9
• 2006 Essentials of Stem Cell Biology ISBN 0-12-088442-9
• 2006 Methods in Enzymology: Volume 418 Embryonic Stem Cells ISBN 0-12-373648-X
• 2006 Methods in Enzymology: Volume 419 Adult Stem Cells ISBN 0-12-373650-1
• 2006 Methods in Enzymology: Volume 420 Stem Cell Tools and Other Experimental Protocols ISBN 0-12-373651-X
• 2007 Principles of Tissue Engineering, Third Edition ISBN 0-12-370615-7
• 2008 Principles of Regenerative Medicine ISBN 978-0-12-369410-2
• 2009 Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the Universe ISBN 978-1933771-69-4
• 2009 Essential Stem Cell Methods ISBN 978-0-12-374741-9
• 2009 Essentials of Stem Cell Biology, Second Edition ISBN 978-0-12-374729-7
• 2009 Foundations of Regenerative Medicine ISBN 978-0123750853

External links

• Personal website, blog, and archive of books, articles and news. 2007
• website Advanced Cell Technology