* Carl Sagan, David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University;
* Luc Montagnier, Discoverer of the AIDS Virus;
* Jonas Salk, Founder of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Developed the Polio Vaccine;
* Linus Pauling, Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry;
* Christiaan Barnard, Emeritus Professor of Surgical Science at the University of Cape Town; Performed the World's First Human Heart Transplant;
* C. Everett Koop, Former Surgeon General of the United States;
* Sir Michael Atiyah, President of the Royal Society;
* Priscilla Kincaid-Smith, President of the World Medical Association and President of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians;
* Robert Gallo, Chief of Tumor Cell Biology National Cancer Institute and Adjunct Professor of Genetics at George Washington University;
* Jonathan Mann, Director of the International AIDS Center, Director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University; and Founding Director of the World Health Organization's Program on AIDS;
* Federico Mayor, Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization;
* James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies;
* Paul Johnston, Ruth Stringer, and David Santillo for Greenpeace International;
* Lynn Goldman, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency;
* The Honorable Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environmental and Development; and
* W. Harding le Riche, Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Robert Lanza is Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has hundreds of publications and inventions, and over two dozen scientific books: among them, "Principles of Tissue Engineering," which is recognized as the definitive reference in the field. Others include One World: The Health & Survival of the Human Species in the 21st Century (Foreword by former President Jimmy Carter), and the "Handbook of Stem Cells" and "Essentials of Stem Cell Biology," which are considered the definitive references in stem cell research.
Dr. Lanza received his BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar. He was also a Fulbright Scholar, and was part of the team that cloned the world's first human embryo for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells. Dr. Lanza's work has been crucial to our understanding nuclear transfer and stem cell biology. 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 greatest early achievements came from his demonstration that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis could be used to generate human embryonic stem (hES) cells without embryonic destruction.
Lanza and colleagues have also succeeded in differentiating human pluripotent stem cells into retinal (RPE) cells, and has shown that they provide long-term benefit in animal models of vision loss. 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 (ACT) received FDA approval to begin clinical trials using them to treat degenerative eye diseases. These two clinical trials began in July 2011. Recently, ACT received similar approval for the first human embryonic stem cell trial in Europe.
Lanza has been a major player in the scientific revolution that has led to the documentation that nuclear transfer/ transcription factors can restore developmental potential in a differentiated cell. One of his recent successes was showing that it is feasible to generate functional oxygen-carrying red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells. The blood cells were comparable to normal transfusable blood and could serve as a potentially inexhaustible source of "universal" blood. His team also discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts - a population of "ambulance" cells- from hES 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 manipulation. This new method provides a potentially safe source of patient-specific stem cells for translation into the clinic. The Editors of the prestigious journal Nature selected Lanza and Kim's paper on protein reprogramming as one of five "Research Highlights" of 2009. Discover magazine stated, "Lanza's single-minded quest to usher in this new age has paid dividends in scientific insights and groundbreaking discoveries."
Dr. Lanza has received numerous awards, including an NIH Director's Award (2010) for "Translating Basic Science Discoveries into New and Better Treatments"; the 2010 'Movers and Shakers' Who Will Shape Biotech Over the Next 20 Years (BioWorld)(along with Craig Venter and President Barack Obama); the 2007 100 Most Inspiring People in the Life-Sciences Industry (PharmaVOICE, "For his discoveries 'behind the medicines making a significant impact on the pipelines of today and of the future'"; the 2007 Outstanding Contribution in Contemporary Biology Award (Brown University, "For his groundbreaking research and contributions in stem cell science and biology"; the 2006 All-Star Award for Biotechnology (MA High Tech, for "pushing stem cells' future"); the 2005 Rave Award for Medicine (Wired magazine, "For eye-opening work on embryonic stem cells"); and Lanza is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare, Who's Who in Science and Engineering; Who's Who in American Education, and Who's Who in Technology, among others. Dr. Lanza has served in numerous national and international leadership capacities, including Conference Co-Chairman, International Symposium on Stem Cells (Tianjin, China 2008); Stem Cell Advisory Committee, International Stem Cell Registry; He has given keynote addresses at dozens of national and international societies, including ASAIO (2001), Annual Molecular & Cellular Biology Symposium (2002), Biotechniques Live/Drug Discovery Technology & Development World Congress (2005), International Stem Cell Conference (2007), Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS)(2007), Translational Regenerative Medicine Forum (2010), among others.
Dr. Lanza and his research have been featured in almost every media outlet in the world, including CNN, TIME, Newsweek, People, as well as the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, among others. Lanza has worked with some of the greatest thinkers of our time, including Nobel laureates Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter, renowned Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner (the "Father of modern behaviorism"), Jonas Salk (discoverer of the Polio vaccine), and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. His current research and work at Advanced Cell Technology focuses on stem cells and regenerative medicine and their potential to provide therapies for some of the world's most deadly and debilitating conditions.
In 2007, Lanza published a feature article, "A New Theory of the Universe" in The American Scholar, a leading intellectual journal which has previously published works by Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, and Carl Sagan, among others. His 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. This new view has become known as Biocentrism. In 2009, he co-authored a book "Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe" with leading astronomer Bob Berman. 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. 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."
You can read more about Dr. Robert Lanza's work at:
http://www.robertlanza.com/
http://www.robertlanzabiocentrism.com/
http://www.advancedcell.com/company/leadership-team/senior-executive-officers/
