Dr. Cibelli is Professor of Animal Biotechnology at Michigan State University. He heads the Cellular Reprogramming Laboratory in the Departments of Animal Science and Physiology since 2003. From 2010 to 2017 he was also the Scientific Director of LARCel, a laboratory of cellular reprogramming dedicated to generating human pluripotent cells under GMP conditions for preclinical studies in Andalucia, Spain. Dr. Cibelli is internationally recognized as one of the pioneers in the area of cellular reprogramming using oocyte-driven protocols. Dr. Cibelli together with his colleagues, were responsible for the generation of the world's first transgenic cloned calves, the first stem cells by nuclear transfer in bovine, the first embryonic stem cells by parthenogenesis in primates and the generation of the first cell line of iPSCs using oocyte factors alone. His work has been published un numerous scientific journals including Science, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Medicine, Nature Methods, PNAS, Cell Stem Cell and JAMA.
Robert Lanza is an American scientist and author whose research spans the range of natural science, from biology to theoretical physics. TIME magazine recognized him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World, and Prospect magazine named him one of the Top 50 “World Thinkers. He has hundreds of scientific publications and over 30 books, including definitive references in the fields of stem cells, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. He’s a former Fulbright Scholar and studied with polio-pioneer Jonas Salk and Nobel laureates Gerald Edelman (known for his work on the biological basis of consciousness) and Rodney Porter. He also worked closely (and co-authored papers in Science on self-awareness and symbolic communication) with noted Harvard psychologist BF Skinner. Dr. Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world’s first human embryo, the first endangered species, and published the first-ever reports of pluripotent stem cell use in humans.