Robert Lanza

Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world's first early stage human embryos,[5][6] as well as the first to successfully generate stem cells from adults using somatic-cell nuclear transfer (therapeutic cloning).[7][8]

Lanza demonstrated that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis could be used to generate embryonic stem cells without embryonic destruction.[9]

In 2001, he was also the first to clone an endangered species (a Gaur),[10] and in 2003, he cloned an endangered wild ox (a Banteng)[11] 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 extend the lifespan of certain cells[12] and to generate immune-compatible tissues, including the first organ grown in the laboratory from cloned cells.[13]

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.[14][15]

His team discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts (a population of "ambulance" cells[16]) 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.[17]

In 2012 Lanza and a team led by Kwang-Soo Kim at Harvard University reported a method for generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells by incubating them with proteins, instead of genetically manipulating the cells to make more of those proteins.[18][19][20]

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.[21][22] With this technology, some forms of blindness could potentially be treatable.[23]

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.[24][25] 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.[26][27] The first person received the embryonic stem cell treatment in the UK in 2012.[28]

The results of the first two clinical trials were published in the Lancet in 2012,[29] with a follow-up paper in 2014,[30] which provided the first published reports of the long-term safety and possible biologic activity of pluripotent stem cell progeny into humans.[31]

In 2007 Lanza's article "A New Theory of the Universe" appeared in The American Scholar.[32] The essay proposed Lanza's idea of a biocentric universe, which places biology above the other sciences.[33][34][35] Lanza's book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the Universe followed in 2009, co-written with Bob Berman.[36]

Lanza's biocentric hypothesis met with a mixed reception.[37] Nobel laureate in 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."[1] Former Arizona State University physicist and antitheist activist Lawrence Krauss stated: "There are no scientific breakthroughs about anything, as far as I can see. It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science."[1] In USA Today 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?"[38] Daniel Dennett, a Tufts University philosopher and eliminative materialist, 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 [consciousness] happens at all. He's stopping where the fun begins."[1]

Lanza subsequently published several books that further developed his concept of biocentrism including a 2016 book, Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death, and a third, The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality, written with Bob Berman and theoretical physicist Matej Pavšič, and published in 2020.[36][39][40]

In January 2023, Lanza published a novel exploring biocentrism, Observer with science fiction author Nancy Kress.[41] Lanza said in an interview that he wanted "to bring [biocentrism] to life" in a story that would explain that "space, time, and the nature of life and death itself depends on the observer in us."[42]