Anton Albert van Niekerk (born 4 December 1953) is a South African bioethicist and academic based at Stellenbosch University.
[4] In 1996, he was largely responsible for the introduction of the MPhil degree in applied ethics at Stellenbosch University, a program which was the first and still is the best known of its kind in South Africa.
[5] As a young lecturer, he was at the forefront of political and intellectual debate and a vehement critic of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
[6] In 2011, he was assaulted in his office at the university by a member of a reactionary right wing movement as a result of an article of his that was published in a national newspaper.
The individual in question had, by his own admission, never read the article and thus applied a sensationalised misinformed interpretation of van Niekerk's argument.
[7] In 1995, van Niekerk was awarded the Stals Prize for Philosophy by the South African Academy for Science and Art.