Presentation of the 2003 Jean Hamburger Award to J. Stewart Cameron

Abstract

It is both a pleasure and an honor, as well as a daunting task, to introduce Stewart Cameron for the Jean Hamburger Award. Stewart, after all, is the reason I am a nephrologist. It is difficult to summarize Stewart’s contribution to nephrology over the past 40 years because he has influenced its development in so many ways. Stewart Cameron is first and foremost an outstanding clinical scientist whose work changed the way we think about glomerulonephritis. He is a predigious author, not only on research papers, but also of reviews and books for fellow researchers, for nephrologists, and for patients. He has been a phenomenal teacher and educator who has mentored more than 250 research fellows from all over the world. His global contacts have led him to travel extensively—indeed, he is his own one-man COMGAN. Stewart is also a politician (although he wouldn’t appreciate being called one), at least in the sense of leader who has been past president not only of the ISN but also of ERA/EDTA and the European Society for Pediatric Nephrologists, two of the other organizations who have joined the ISN in this World Congress. Finally, Stewart Cameron is an active historian of nephrology, helping us to understand the present through the work of great and forgotten figures from the past. Above all, however, Stewart Cameron is an enthusiast. Stewart Cameron was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1934 and had his early education there. While at secondary school, he moved to Ealing in London where his father worked in the nascent British film industry. In 1953, Stewart went to Guy’s Hospital Medical School, where very unusually for that time, in addition to his medical training, he took an intercalated science degree, which he completed with first-class honors. He qualified in Medicine in 1959 and had already decided he wanted a career in research. He rapidly completed his initial clinical appointments and moved on to become a Junior Lecturer at Guy’s in 1962. Stewart Cameron’s early research training was greatly influenced by John Butterfield, the then Professor of Experimental Medicine at Guy’s, whose group were just then discovering the phenomenon of microalbuminuria