Robert Lanza


Robert Lanza is an American medical doctor, scientist and philosopher. He is currently Head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, and is Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine and Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Early life and education

Lanza was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up south of there, in Stoughton, Massachusetts.
Lanza "altered the genetics 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 the University of Pennsylvania, receiving BA and MD degrees.
There, he was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a University Scholar. Lanza was also a Fulbright Scholar. He currently resides in Clinton, Massachusetts.

Career

Stem cell research

Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world's first early stage human embryos, as well as the first to successfully generate stem cells from adults using somatic-cell nuclear transfer.
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, and in 2003, he cloned an endangered wild ox 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 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 amputation.
In 2012 Lanza and a team led by Kwang-Soo Kim at Harvard University reported a method for generating induced pluripotent stem cells by incubating them with proteins, instead of genetically manipulating the cells to make more of those proteins.

Clinical trials for blindness

Lanza's team at Advanced Cell Technology were able to generate retinal pigmented epithelium cells from stem cells, and subsequent studies found that these cells could restore vision in animal models of macular degeneration. With this technology, some forms of blindness could potentially be treatable.
In 2010, ACT received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for clinical trials of a pluripotent stem cell-based treatment for use in people with degenerative eye diseases. In 2011 ACT received approval from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to use its PSC-based cell therapy in the UK; this was the first approval to study a PSC-based treatment in Europe. The first person received the embryonic stem cell treatment in the UK in 2012.
The results of the first two clinical trials were published in the Lancet in 2012, with a follow up paper in 2014,which provided the first published reports of the long-term safety and possible biologic activity of pluripotent stem cell progeny into humans.

Biocentrism

In 2007 Lanza's article "A New Theory of the Universe" appeared in The American Scholar. The essay addressed Lanza's idea of a biocentric universe, which places biology above the other sciences. Lanza's book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the Universe followed in 2009, co-written with Bob Berman. In 2016 a second book, Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death was published.
Lanza's biocentric hypothesis met with a mixed reception. Deepak Chopra called "Lanza's insights into the nature of consciousness original and exciting" and stated 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." David Thompson, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said that Lanza's "work is a wake-up call".
Nobel laureate 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 happens at all. He's stopping where the fun begins."

Awards and public commentary

Lanza has received numerous awards and other recognition, including TIME Magazine’s 2014 Time 100 list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World", Prospect magazine 2015 list of “Top 50 World Thinkers”, Marquis Who’s Who 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2013 “Il Leone di San Marco Award in Medicine”, a 2010 National Institutes of Health Director’s Award for “Translating Basic Science Discoveries into New and Better Treatments”; a 2010 “Movers and Shakers” Who Will Shape Biotech Over the Next 20 Years ; a 2005 Wired magazine "Rave Award" for medicine “For eye-opening work on embryonic stem cells”, and a 2006 Mass High Tech journal “All Star” award for biotechnology for “pushing stem cells’ future”.

Publications

Lanza has authored and co-edited books on topics involving tissue engineering, cloning, stem cells, regenerative medicine, and world health.

Books