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Robert Lanza, MD

• Lanza Named One of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World

   

  
  Dr. Robert Lanza selected for the 2014 TIME 100 list of the hundred most influential people in the world, along with Pope Francis, Beyoncé, Vladimin Putin, Robert Redford, and other artists, pioneers, leaders, titans and icons.

   

   

• Lanza Featured in Fortune Magazine

  “…he’s the standard-bearer for stem cell research”

  “Lanza published a paper in The Lancet earlier this year detailing the results of early clinical trials involving two women suffering from macular degeneration. A UCLA ophthalmologist
  
  injected each woman with 50,000 retinal cells derived from human embryonic stem cells, and according to the paper, both claim to have better vision as a result. They’re not 20/20. But after a single injection one now walks the mall alone, uses her computer, and can pour a cup of coffee. The other sees colors and can read five letters on the eye chart. If Lanza is remembered one day as the man who saved millions from blindness, his story will provide a ready-made biopic for Ben Affleck. Born in the hardscrabble town of Roxbury and raised by a professional gambler, he escaped the economic underclass through intelligence and imagination. At 13, he altered the DNA of a chicken to make it change color; the experiment was published in Nature. His sisters never graduated from high school. He received an MD from Penn and a Fulbright scholarship, and has collaborated with giants, including B.F. Skinner and Jonas Salk. He was the first ever to clone an endangered species, and now he’s the standard-bearer for stem cell research.”

   

   

• Dr. Robert Lanza Featured on ABC’s Barbara Walters Special

  
  Robert Lanza featured on “Live to be 150, Can You Do It?”.

  by ABC News

   

   

• Lanza Named One of the Top 50 "World Thinkers"

   

  
  Dr. Lanza selected as one of Prospect Magazine’s “World Thinkers 2015.” The thinkers were chosen for “engaging in original and profound ways with the central questions of the world today,” as well as for their continuing significance for “this year’s biggest questions” (in economics, science, philosophy, cultural and social criticism and in politics).

   

   

• Lanza Considered One of the Fathers of Applied Stem Cell Biology

   

  
  “Robert Lanza is widely acknowledged as one of the fathers of the field of applied stem cell biology.”
   
   – Mark S Blumenkranz, MD, MMS
  HJ Smead Professor, Stanford University, and Trustee, Brown University

   

   

• Google Scholar Citations

  
  h-index for Lanza = 74

  From Wikipedia: The h-index measures both the productivity and impact of a scientist or scholar. A value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major [US] research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. According to Hirsch (who put forward the h-index), an h index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional.

   

   

   

• Lanza has published extensively in leading scientific journals. Here is a sampling of his papers:

  Science (207: 543, 1980)
  Science (212: 695, 1981)
  Science (283: 1849, 1999)
  Science (288: 665, 2000)
  Science (294: 1893, 2001)
  Science (295: 819, 2002)
  Nature (252: 597, 1974)
  Nature (308: 61, 1984)
  Nature (439: 216, 2006)
  Nature (444: 481, 2006)
  Cell (11: 115, 1977)
  Cell (17: 491, 1979)
  Lancet (365: 1636, 2005)
  Lancet (379: 713, 2012)
  Lancet (385: 509, 2015)

   

   

• Robert Lanza Featured in Financial Times

  

  At Home with Robert Lanza, stem-cell and cloning pioneer

  Professionally, Lanza works at the cutting edge of human discovery, but the majority of his domestic space looks like a museum from a bygone era.

   

   

   

• Lanza Voted Top 4 “Most Influential People on Stem Cells”

   

  
  Lanza featured in the 2013 “TOP 50 Global Stem Cell Influencers.” It is the result of a global survey of the stem cell community, which yielded thousands of votes. The 50 personalities were picked based on their career achievements whether this was groundbreaking discovery and research, innovation, or lifetime dedication. Lanza was among the top four on the list, alongside James Thomson and Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka.

   

   

• Lanza Featured in Der Spiegel, Europe’s largest news magazine

   

  

  The Dawning of a New Era of Hope

  Stem cell researcher Robert Lanza hopes to save thousands of lives — and for a long time this caused him to fear for his own… At the time, a doctor was threatened at a nearby fertility clinic, and a pipe bomb exploded at a bio lab in Boston. “Back then I thought that there was probably a 50-50 chance that I was going to get knocked off because I was so visible,” says the doctor. “I said, okay, try to kill me — I’m still going to do what I think is right.” In Lanza’s case, doing what is “right” involves working with therapies based on human stem cells. The blind shall see again; the paralyzed shall walk again; the hemophiliac shall not bleed anymore. That may sound like something out of the Bible, but Lanza is no faith healer. In fact, the US business magazine Fortune called him “the standard-bearer for stem cell research.” Lanza is often compared to the main character played by Matt Damon in the film “Good Will Hunting,” a highly talented outsider who, like Lanza, comes from a humble background.

  Initial Success: “We have some surprisingly good visual outcome,” says Steven Schwartz, an eye surgeon at UCLA. He says that one of his patients can read a clock again and go shopping, while another can recognize colors again. Lanza is a “genius” and his work is “stellar,” Schwartz says.

   

   

 
Previous News

• DISCOVER Interview: Robert Lanza

  
  Growing new body parts, reversing paralysis, stretching the limits of the human life span: This trailblazing stem cell researcher believes it is all within our reach.

  Discover Magazine

• Biocentrism / Robert Lanza’s Theory of Everything

  
  BIOCENTRISM

  How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

  “Like “A Brief History of Time” it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work. Almost every society of mankind has explained the mystery of our surroundings and being by invoking a god or group of gods. Scientists work to acquire objective answers from the infinity of space or the inner machinery of the atom. Lanza proposes a biocentrist theory which ascribes the answer to the observer rather than the observed. The work is a scholarly consideration of science and philosophy that brings biology into the central role in unifying the whole. The book will appeal to an audience of many different disciplines because it is a new way of looking at the old problem of our existence. Most importantly, it makes you think.”
      – Nobel Prize Winner E. Donnall Thomas

• Beyond Biocentrism

  
  BEYOND BIOCENTRISM
  Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

  Biocentrism shocked the world with a radical rethinking of the nature of reality … but that was just the beginning.

• The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself

  
  The Biocentric Universe Theory: Stem-cell guru Robert Lanza presents a radical new view of the universe and everything in it.

  Discover Magazine

• Lanza’s Research Featured on the Cover of U.S. News & World Report

  
  Lanza’s team cloned the first human embryo. How American scientists made history by creating lifesaving embryos cells.

  U.S. News & World Report

• Lanza’s Team Clones First Endangered Species

  
  Endangered Species Cloned

  Newsweek

• Lanza Receives “Rave Award” for Medicine

  
  Robert Lanza Receives Award for Eye-Opening Work on Embryonic Stem Cells

  Wired Magazine

• Robert Lanza Featured in People Magazine

  
  Send in the Clones. Biologist Robert Lanza has a plan to help endangered species fight extinction.

  People Magazine

• Lanza’s Research Featured on Front Page of New York Times

  
  Biologists have developed a technique for establishing colonies of human embryonic stem cells from an early human embryo without destroying it.

  New York Times

• Robert Lanza Featured on Front Page of New York Times

  
  Stem Cell Test Tried on Mice Saves Embryo. Technique Could Shift Debate on Humans.

  New York Times

• A New Theory of the Universe

  
  A New Theory of the Universe: Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by adding life to the equation.

  The American Scholar

• Featured on the Cover of Wired Magazine

  
  Seven Days of Creation. The inside story of a human cloning experiment.

  Wired Magazine
  

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  Lanza’s Early Cloning Research Featured on the Front Covers of Scientific American, Wired Magazine, and U.S.News & World Report, Among Others

   

  
   

   

  
   

   

  
   

   

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  U.S. News & World Report Cover Story

  “…his mentors described him [Lanza] as a “genius,” a “renegade” thinker, even likening him to Einstein.”

  
  “Robert Lanza is the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting. Growing up underprivileged in Stoughton, Mass., south of Boston, the young preteen caught the attention of Harvard Medical School researchers when he showed up on the university steps having successfully altered the genetics of chickens in his basement. Over the next decade, he was to be “discovered” and taken under the wing of scientific giants such as psychologist B. F. Skinner, immunologist Jonas Salk, and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. His mentors described him as a “genius,” a “renegade” thinker, even likening him to Einstein.”

   

 

Research with B. F. Skinner
“Greatest Psychologist of All Time”

• 
  Most Influential Psychologists

  (American Psychological Association)

  
  

  1. B. F. Skinner

  2. Jean Piaget

  3. Sigmund Freud

• Symbolic Communication Between Two Pigeons

  
  SCIENCE 207; 543 (1980)
  Lanza (with Skinner & Epstein)

• “Self-Awareness” in the Pigeon

  
  SCIENCE 212; 695 (1981)
  Lanza (with Skinner & Epstein)

• “Lying” in the Pigeon

  
  Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 38; 201 (1982)
  Lanza (with Skinner & Starr)

• Lanza & Skinner’s Work Featured in TIME Magazine

  
  Pigeon Talk − A triumph for bird brains
  TIME Magazine

• Lanza & Skinner’s Work on Symbolic Communication Featured in New York Times

  
  Pigeons’ ‘Conversation’ Triggers a Debate About Language
  New York Times

• Lanza & Skinner’s Work on Self-Awareness in New York Times

  
  Science Watch: ‘Self-Awareness’ in Animals
  New York Times

• Lanza and Skinner’s Work Featured in My Weekly Reader

  
  Pigeons Punch Buttons. Talking or Training?
  My Weekly Reader

 

Research with Jonas Salk and Christiaan Barnard

• Work with Jonas Salk

  
  Developed Polio Vaccine

  J. Supramol. Struct 182;33 (1979)
  Lanza (with Salk)

• Work with Christiaan Barnard

  
  Performed the World’s First Heart Transplant

  New England Journal of Medicine 307; 1275 (1983)
  Lanza (with Barnard & Cooper)

  JAMA 249; 1746 (1983)
  Lanza (with Barnard, Cooper & Cassidy)

  American Heart Journal 107; 8 (1984)
  Lanza (with Barnard, Cooper & Boyd)

 

Research with Rodney Porter and Gerald Edelman

• Work with Professor Rodney Porter

  
  Recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology

  Lanza worked with Porter at Oxford University in 1977

• Work with Dr. Gerald Edelman

  
  Nobel-winner was “The Father of Modern Immunology”

  Lanza worked with Edelman at Rockefeller University in 1976

Quick Links

• Books by Dr. Robert Lanza
  Facts about Dr. Robert Lanza
  Dr. Robert Lanza – Beyond Biocentrism
  Dr. Robert Lanza on The Huffington Post
  Robert Lanza - Science & Nonduality
  Dr. Robert Lanza on Psychology Today
  Biocentrism Site for Robert Lanza, M.D.
  Robert Lanza Interview By Deepak Chopra
  Robert Lanza's Theory of Everything
  Robert Lanza Quotes
  Robert Lanza Afterlife
  Robert Lanza, Professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine
  biocentricity.net: Exploring the theory of the biocentric universe