Robert Lanza, MD (born 11 February 1956) is a leading American Scientist and is currently Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Lanza was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His home life was less than the Norman Rockwell ideal. His father, Samuel Lanza, was a professional gambler who played cards for a living, and none of his three sisters finished high school . Like Emerson and Thoreau -- two of the greatest American Transcendentalists – Lanza’s youth was spent exploring the forested woods of Massachusetts that teemed with life. His understanding of nature began on those journeys. Growing up underprivileged in Stoughton, Massachusetts, south of Boston, the young preteen caught the attention of Harvard Medical School reseachers when he showed up on the university steps having succcesfully altered the genetics of chickens in his basement. Over the next decade, he was "discovered" and taken under the wing of scientific giants such as Jonas Salk, B. F. Skinner, and Christiaan Barnard. Lanza received both BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a University Scholar. Lanza is a former Fulbright Scholar and has been described as "the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting." Lanza currently resides in Clinton, Massachusetts.

Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world's first early stage human embryos for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells. 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.