Draft:Nigel M. de S. Cameron

• Comment: Please don't cite predatory journals, and please remove the external links from the body. I must note that, this draft reads like a CV, and some parts of the text aren't written in a formal, neutral encyclopedic tone. --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 19:53, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

I have removed the inline external links, replacing some with specific citations. I moved some of the citations after the punctuation, but this still needs doing in other sections. – Fayenatic London 17:39, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

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Nigel M. de S. Cameron is a British-American writer who has published on history, religion, bioethics and the impacts of new technologies.

He is currently President Emeritus of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET) in Washington, DC; a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy of the University of Ottawa (ISSP), where he was recently Fullbright Visiting Research Chair in Science and Society; a director of UK think tank BioCentre; and a non-executive director of the U.S. technology start-up Genesis Systems, working on air-generated water. He is also writing the biography of former U.S. Surgeon General C.Everett Koop for the University of Massachusetts Press.

Early life and education

Cameron was raised in the United Kingdom, born of Scottish parents in Folkestone, Kent, and attended Bradford Grammar School. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and then at New College, Edinburgh, where he prepared for the ministry of the (presbyterian) Church of Scotland. His PhD under philosopher and theologian John McIntyre was a study of religious authority in the 19th century focused on the work of Biblical scholar and Arabist William Robertson Smith. He later completed a Diploma in Business Administration and an M.B.A. in the Edinburgh Business School of Heriot-Watt University. In 2016 he published a memoir of his boyhood.

Career

He began his career in the 1980s as founding Warden of Rutherford House, Edinburgh, a private research centre, where his scholarly interests broadened from religion and history to embrace the emerging field of bioethics; from 1984, he served as founding editor of the journal Ethics and Medicine. In 1992, he established and initially edited the trilingual European Journal of Theology. Cameron moved to the U.S. in 1991 to direct the Ph.D. program at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, part of a small religious university based in Deerfield, Illinois, where he later served as Provost. In 2004 he was appointed Research Professor and Associate Dean at the Chicago-Kent College of Law in the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he directed the Center on Nanotechnology and Society, the first such university-based project in the United States, and co-founded with law professor, Lori B. Andrews the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future, with a particular focus on bringing conservative and progressive minds together to address the challenges of the science and society agenda. In 2007, he developed the university-based Institute into a free-standing Washington, DC, think tank, the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET), the only such think tank in DC not funded by technology corporations, whose work he directed for a decade. After stepping down in 2017, he joined the founding team for the UK-based web magazine UnHerd as technology editor.

Academic work

Cameron has published in several fields, including the following:

History: Biblical Higher Criticism and the Defense of Infallibilism in 19th-Century Britain (Edwin Mellen Press, 1987). Organizing General Editor, Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology (T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1993).

Bioethics: The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates (Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), foreword by U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, introduction by Sir John Peel, past president of the British Medical Association. “Bioethics in Christianity,” in the Encyclopedia of Bioethics], 3rd edition (Thomson Gale). “Christianity, Perspectives on the Anthropocene,” in the Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene , (Elsevier, 2017).

Religion: Editor, The Challenge of Evangelical Theology. Essays in Approach and Method (Rutherford House, 1987). Editor, The Power and Weakness of God: Impassibility and Orthodoxy (Rutherford House/Baker, 1990). Editor, Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell (Rutherford House/Paternoster Press, 1992).

Technology: Editor (with M. Ellen Mitchell), Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century (Wiley, 2007). Editor, "Emerging Global Issues in Biometrics and Policy" , Review of Policy Research, 29:1 (January, 2012). Will Robots Take Your Job? A Plea for Consensus (Polity/Wiley, 2017).

Other fields of interest have included corporate social responsibility, on which he served as a columnist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; implications of the Covid pandemic, on which he wrote a series of articles for ISSP; privacy, for which he wrote a foreword to Devjani Sen and Rukhsana Ahmed’s volume on privacy and health apps; the interface of emerging technologies with business, policy, and ethics, on which he has moderated conferences in Washington, DC, Brussels, and London, and in 2015 the GITEX Gulf IT conference in Dubai.

Media

Cameron has written for various publications, including the Guardian , Metro , Encompass , the Chicago Tribune , the Hippocratic Post , Nature , BeliefNet and the San Francisco Chronicle , as well as many columns for UnHerd and been interviewed by the New York Times , the BBC , PBS , NBC , Wired and other media including a wide-ranging interview in Atlantic , in which he argued that the U.S. government should move its seat from DC to the West Coast.

Corporate-related

He has served as a consultant for corporations including Constellation Research, Giesecke and Devrient and Digijaks Group. He gave a keynote on radical life extension at the AMP corporate innovation conference, Sydney, Australia in 2011. He has three times been an Executive in Residence at Swiss Bank UBS' Wolfsberg center, and spoken at The Economist Asia Investors' Forum (Hong Kong) and conference in the digital economy (Madrid) both in 2015. He also serves as a start-up mentor with the Mentor Capital Network.

Government-related

U.S. testimony: House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on non-proliferation and human enhancement (2008); U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on stem-cell research (2001); U.S. House Commerce Committee hearing on human cloning (2001); U.S. House Commerce Committee hearing on human cloning (1998). He has served as bioethics adviser on U.S. delegations to the United Nations and UNESCO, including the 2002 Ad Hoc Committee on an International Convention against the Reproductive Cloning of Human Beings, and the Inter-Governmental Committee of Experts (Category II), Universal Instrument on Bioethics negotiation, UNESCO, Paris (2005). He has been a member of United States diplomatic delegations to the UNESCO General Conference, in Paris, in 2011, 2013, and 2015. He was appointed a member of the UNESCO Director-General’s Ad Hoc Expert Group on the Revision of the 1974 Recommendation on the Status of Scientific Researchers (2012-14). He has served four terms as a commissioner on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, including as chair of its Committee on Social and Human Sciences. In 2007, he was the U.S. government nominee to the UN Human Rights Council for the mandate of Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health.