Robert Lanza

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Robert Lanza is Chief Scientific Officer Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine ^[1].

Lanza received both BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a University Scholar. He has authored books on topics involving tissue engineering, cloning, and stem cells ^[2], 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.^[3] Others include Principles of Tissue Engineering, Principles of Regenerative Medicine^[4], 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).^[5].

Lanza is a former Fulbright Scholar and has worked with well-known scientists Jonas Salk, B. F. Skinner, and Christiaan Barnard. According to a cover story in U.S. News & World Report, “Robert Lanza is the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting.^[6]

Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world's first early stage human embryos for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells ^[7][8]. In 2001 he was also the first to clone an endangered species (a Gaur)^[9], and in 2003, he cloned an endangered wild ox (a Banteng)^[10] 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 ^[11] and to generate immune-compatible tissues, including the first organ tissue-engineered from cloned cells ^[12]. One of his most recent successes is in getting stem cells to grow into retinal cells. Using this technology some forms of blindness may be curable. Lanza’s team also recently discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts – a population of “ambulance” cells ^[13] - 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 ^[14]. However, perhaps his greatest fame has come from his suggestion that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis may be used to generate embryonic stem cells without embryonic destruction.^[15]

Lanza has received numerous awards, including a Rave Award for medicine ^[16], and an “All Star” award for biotechnology ^[17]. He believes that stem cell technology will have a substantial importance in the future of medicine.^[18]

In 2007, Lanza published a feature article “A New Theory of the Universe” in The American Scholar^[19]. 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 ^[20][21][22] 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 ^[23]

Lanza currently resides in Clinton, Massachusetts.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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