Director, Center on Nanotechnology and Society at the Illinois Institute of Technology

Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Ph.D., is Director of the Center on Nanotechnology and Society at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and Research Professor of Bioethics and Associate Dean at IIT’s Chicago-Kent College of Law. He also chairs the Centre for Bioethics and Public Policy in London, UK. Widely recognized as a commentator on bioethics and biotech policy issues, Cameron has appeared on ABC Nightline, CNN, PBS Frontline, and the BBC. His books include The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates and Human Dignity in the Biotech Century. He has given congressional testimony on ethical and policy implications of human cloning stem cell research, and has also represented the United States as bioethics advisor on the U.S. delegation to the United Nations General Assembly meeting to consider a convention on human cloning, and the UNESCO Inter-governmental Committee of Experts that finalized the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. Cameron co-chaired the 2005 International Congress on Nanotechnology, and serves on the advisory boards for the Converging Technologies Bar Association and the Journal of Nanotechnology, Law and Business.

Recent progress in a range of technologies, and the prospect of their exponential development, has given fresh credibility to the idea that we shall be able to bring about fundamental changes in human capacities. This proposal, prima facie, fascinates and encourages some as it creates distaste and alarm in others. The question we face, at one level, is whether wisdom lies in repugnance or enthusiasm. But the issues go well beyond the presence or absence of aesthetic appeal, and raise perhaps the most profound of all human questions - that of the given-ness of the human condition, and whether it is proper or wise to seek its end not in transcendence (which from primitive times has been the lot of human artistic creativity and the life of the mind) but its supersession in a re-engineereed model of human being that breaks fundamentally with the analogy of given-ness and moves to a model of self-creation. What caveats suggest themselves?