The First Clone Scientists have finally cloned a human embryo. The breakthrough promises cures for terrible diseases. Here’s the inside story: By Joannie Fischer, U.S. News & World Report 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 …

Continue reading “Lanza’s Research Featured on the Cover of U.S. News & World Report”

Description Development proceeds from clusters of self-renewing stem cells to beautiful networks of differentiated cells. How stem cells acquire instructions for differentiation from their developmental landscape remains a mystery. When these instructions are revealed, stem cell-based therapies may transform medicine, providing a source of replacement cells and tissues for patients with chronic diseases. This beautiful …

Continue reading “Book Review: Essentials of Stem Cell Biology”

Whether defying the dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine so he could publish a book on world health or challenging the titans of cosmology, Robert Lanza has never followed the script. It’s no wonder, then, that this renegade doctor would lead the charge into medicine’s most controversial turf: the creation of cloned …

Continue reading “DISCOVER Interview: Robert Lanza”

Stem cells raise the prospect of regenerating failing body parts and curing diseases that have so far defied drug-based treatment. Patients are buoyed by reports of the cells’ near-miraculous properties, but many of the most publicized scientific studies have subsequently been refuted, and other data have been distorted in debates over the propriety of deriving …

Continue reading “The Stem Cell Challenge”

Uninformed visitors to Robert Lanza’s home, a wooden building on a 10-acre private island in Clinton, Massachusetts, might assume he was an eccentric antiquarian, obsessed with his trove of prehistoric relics. And, in part, this is true. For the past 20 years Lanza, 58, has lived alone, surrounded by a collection of dinosaur fossils, but …

Continue reading “At Home with Robert Lanza”

You’ve laughed and cried. And you may even fall in love and grow old with someone, only to be ripped apart in the end by death and disease. The universe leaves you dead or grieving with a hole in you as big as infinity. Can life really be reduced to the laws of physics, or …

Continue reading “Why You Will Always Exist”

You spend a third of your life sleeping. What if your dreams are real? Perhaps our dismissal of dreams as “just dreams” is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness and physical reality. “I am real” said Alice (in Wonderland). “If I wasn’t real, I shouldn’t be able to cry.” “I hope you …

Continue reading “Are Dreams An Extension Of Physical Reality?”

When I was young, I stayed at my neighbor’s house. They had a grandfather clock. Between the tick and the tock of the pendulum, I lay awake thinking about the perverse nature of time. Mr. O’Donnell is gone now. His wife Barbara, now in her nineties, greets me with her cane when I go back …

Continue reading “Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time”

You keep staring at the repair man. His words are starting to sink in. The fabulous and expensive generator you bought a few years ago to keep the lights burning during storms and power failures needs a major repair. “A head gasket?” You echo the phrase he just used, fearing that it has a pricey …

Continue reading “How Your Mind Really Works—Quantum Physics, Mayonnaise & the Mystery of Red”