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 embryos for therapy and the engineering of spare human parts.
The value of therapeutic cloning has long been clear to Lanza, who did his early work with South African heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. Starting from those early days, Lanza understood that the barrier to tissue transfer was rejection by the recipient. From an entire organ to a dose of embryonic stem cells, if the tissue’s DNA came from anyone else, the transplant would be rejected without the aid of harsh immunosuppressive drugs. “The treatment could be worse than the problem,” Lanza found. But embryonic clones, the source of an endless supply of stem cells imprinted with one’s personal DNA, could alter the equation in favor of the patient and augur a paradigm shift in medicine on par with the changes brought about by antibiotics and vaccines.
Lanza’s single-minded quest to usher in this new age has paid dividends in scientific insights and groundbreaking discoveries. Today a world force in the field of regenerative medicine, he’s close to delivering cellular therapies that might reseed the immune system, heal damaged hearts, even save limbs. Yet for almost 20 years government policy has kept his innovations literally on ice. He has been called a murderer for tampering with embryos, and personal threats were so common at one point that he believed he would be killed.
Enduring tough times and fighting for his beliefs suit Lanza well. He grew up poor in the Roxbury section of Boston and, later, suburban Stoughton, where he had a difficult relationship with his mother and was distanced from his professional gambler father. Year round, Lanza says, he was rarely allowed inside his own house except to eat dinner and sleep. With nowhere else to go, he spent his youth roaming the nearby wilderness immersed in nature’s mysteries.
Though initially labeled “slow” at school, in 1969 Lanza distinguished himself by transferring genes from black chickens to white ones when he was just 14, a mere three years after scientists cracked the genetic code. That extraordinary early feat, eventually published in Nature, signaled a raw scientific talent that his mentors (who came to include Jonas Salk and B. F. Skinner) likened to Einstein’s. In a 2001 article, U.S. News & World Report called Lanza the “living embodiment” of the fictional genius in the movie Good Will Hunting, whose Massachusetts accent is as thick as Lanza’s own.
Today Lanza lives on an island in a small Massachusetts lake, keeping a veritable museum of fossils and dinosaur bones and surrounded by the nature he cherishes. DISCOVER senior editor Pamela Weintraub interviewed Lanza at his Worcester office.
You have always bucked authority, haven’t you?
In the real world, people had a different plan for me, the boy from Roxbury with a family so rough and lacking in education. There would be fights. The police would be called.
The Stoughton public school system had three classes in elementary school: A, B, and C. I was put in the C class with the kids throwing spitballs at the teachers, the ones who had been held back.
How did you cope?
There was a golf course nearby, so I earned money by collecting and returning golf balls. When I had saved $18.95, I had enough to mail-order a little squirrel monkey, sitting in the palm of a woman’s hand, that was advertised in the back of Field & Stream. I sent in my money and forgot about it, but a year later I came home from school and there’s this monkey in the middle of the kitchen, tied up inside a box with these pellets in it. “Stay away; it will attack,” my mother said, but here was this little teeny baby squirrel monkey. It was sneezing; it had a cold. I went up to it and it just curled up. And it became my best friend. It was just like a little person—little fingerprints, everything. It was actually smarter than a lot of my friends.
Back then I was on my own. I went into ponds to get snapping turtles. I would go out for miles in the middle of the winter, using footprints to track raccoons. I fell through the ice on a pond 15 miles from civilization up to my waist when it was below zero. I would go up in trees and catch little screech owls in their holes. I’d go on long excursions trying to figure out how the universe worked. Even at that early age, I was in awe and wonder of the world.
A squirrel monkey and nature sustained you. Was that enough?
Fortunately, I also had a neighbor, Barbara O’Donnell, and her husband, Eugene—wonderful people. If I brought a bug to them, they’d buy me a magnifying glass; if I found a bird egg, they’d get me a book on birds. Every now and then you run into an extraordinary human being who does things selflessly, and Barbara O’Donnell was like that. When a black family moved in next door, the neighborhood tried to stop it, but Barbara interceded. She always fought for what was right. They say that you incorporate the superego structure of your parents. Well, not my parents, but hopefully I’ve incorporated Barbara’s and Gene’s. Today my colleagues and the [Catholic] Church and the president and even the pope can attack me and it’s just like, you know what? I’ve seen a lot worse. Say what you want. I’m doing what I think is right.
It’s lucky that you were able to find such kindness and support. Yet school officials still kept you in the C class?
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher realized that I didn’t fit in the C class and encouraged me to do a science project, so naturally I did it on animals, and my best friend, Steven, did his on rocks. He won first prize and I won second. That was my first entry. That’s when I began to feel I shouldn’t have been pegged because of my family circumstance, and that people should be able to prove themselves.
I take it that’s what you did to prove yourself.
Every year after that I did a science project, and in the eighth grade, Barbara O’Donnell, my neighbor, became my science teacher. If not for what she did for me then, I wouldn’t be here today. She arranged for me to be in the honors biology class in high school, something that was actually open only to the students at the top of the A division. It caused chaos because I leaped over all these people ahead of me. “In this one honors class, biology, they’ve got this loser....What is this the rats dragged in?” I was determined to prove them wrong. So I hatched an idea to win the whole science fair, something that only seniors had done. My plan was to alter the genetic makeup of a white animal and make it pigmented.
The genetic code had been cracked only three years earlier, in 1966. Still you planned what amounts to genetic engineering.
My honors biology teacher told me it was impossible. That made it a challenge. I saved up nickels and dimes from the golf balls and took a bus and trolley to Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine. I ended up finding an article on extracting nuclear protein [containing DNA] from cells using ethanol. Barbara drove me to a farm to get eggs laid by pigmented chickens and we tracked down another farm to get eggs from white Plymouth Rock chickens. I still remember trying to get the equipment. I went to the hospital and talked them into giving me syringes. Another hospital gave me penicillin so my animals wouldn’t get infected, and I found a guy who worked at one of the state labs who had a centrifuge and chemicals in his basement—that’s where I extracted the DNA. But most of the work I did at home. My mother would not allow me to have anything in the house, so I found an unfinished back room next to the furnace in the basement, and there, in a little corner, I built an incubator for the white chicken eggs. At a very early stage, I introduced the pigmented genes into the white embryos with a syringe. Which, of course, was very problematic because I had to figure out how to make the eggs so you could see where the right spot was, and most of ’em you would kill or they would die. There I was trying to alter the genetic makeup of a chicken, and my mother’s talking to a neighbor saying, “Oh, yeah, Robby is trying to hatch chicken eggs.”