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. Lanza is also Chief Scientific Advisor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine International.

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. Lanza's 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.

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. For instance, macular degeneration alone affects more than 30 million people worldwide and is the leading cause of blindness in patients over 55 in the United States. In fact, several of these currently untreatable eye diseases cause 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 latest 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. A second experiment tested the long-term safety of the cells in mice--an important requirement for moving into human testing--and found no evidence that the cells cause any pathology or tumors.

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

Controversy

“Lanza has been on the frontier of cloning and stem cell studies for more than a decade, so he's well-acclimated to controversy,” states Alan Boyle, MSNBC.com’s Science Editor. “But his book Biocentrism is generating controversy on a different plane by arguing that our consciousness plays a central role in creating the cosmos.” Any claim that space and time aren't cold, hard, physical things has to raise an eyebrow. Some physicists point out that Lanza's view is fully in line with the perspective from quantum mechanics that the observer plays a huge role in how reality is observed. Indeed, Richard Conn Henry, a physics and astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote “So 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!” Physicist Lawrence Krauss has said “It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science." Although biocentrism has generated considerable controversy and criticism, it has been pointed out that Lanza is proposing a paradigm shift, and that by definition, a new paradigm always appears to be nonsense from within the established paradigm. A proposal to change from one paradigm to another is very different than a proposal to replace one idea with another within a paradigm. Most of biocentrism's critics have been treating it as if it is the latter rather than the former, and critiquing it from within the assumptions of the paradigm Lanza is seeking to replace.

One critic of biocentrism, Tufts researcher Daniel Dennett, wrote a book with the bold title, Conscousness Explained. However, according to Lanza and renowned philosopher and consciousness expert David Chalmers, Dennett seems to come to no useful conclusions about the nature of consciousness itself, despite the book’s ambitious title. Near the end of his volume, Dennett conceded almost as an afterthought that conscious experience is a complete mystery. Some researchers have referred to the work as “Consciousness Ignored.” Dennett joins a long parade of researchers who ignored all the central mysteries of subjective experience, and merely addressed the most superficial or easiest-to-tackle aspects of consciousness, those susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, which are explainable or potentially explainable with neural mechanisms and brain architecture.

External links

• Personal website, blog, and archive of books, articles and news, 2007