"If you or your loved ones are stricken with an illness and your only hope of being cured is therapeutic cloning, will you go for it? Why?"

Yes, I will encourage my loved ones or even myself to go for it. To live or to die, one has to choose either one. If one chooses to live, one has to definitely choose therapeutic cloning since this is the only hope to be cured.

Personally, I feel that therapeutic cloning is not so terrifying. It just involves duplicating a healthy copy of a sick person's tissues or organ for transplant. The damages therapeutic cloning inflict is not as serious as that of human cloning. It does not really go against human rights since it is just a stem cell research.

If one chooses to live, he has to forgone certain things. One example is one's religion. If one is a strong Catholic believer, he has to weigh the benefits and disadvantages that therapeutic cloning can give and cause. Note: Catholicism are against therapeutic cloning.

But for me, I will ask :"Why give up your life just to hold on to your belief (religion)? Shouldn't one be flexible?"

I am fortunate. My religion is Budddhism and Buddhism supports therapeutic cloning. Though embryonic stem-cell research is a murder in the eyes of Buddhiists, that only applies to destroying 'excess' embryos. However, if the research is conducted on already-aborted embryos with the good intention of finding cures for diseases, it is permissible. In other words, to what extent Buddhism supports therapeutic cloning, mainly depends on the doer's intention. Since me or my loved ones are stricken with illness and that our only hope of being cured is therapeutic cloning, and that our religion, Buddhism, supports this type of cloning, we will therefore go for it.

Another reason for my advocation is that Singapore itself, supports therapeutic cloning. The benefits of therapeutic cloning is that the stem cells can be turn into nerve cells, heart-muscle cells, pancreas cell, blood cells and so on. It is hoped that these cells can be used to repair and renew activities of the damaged parts of the human body such as diseased brains, severed spinal cords, torn nerves or defective hearts. Thus since therapeutic cloning can bring about such great benefits to the suffering or sick people, and can advance science into a new era, I see no reason in not supporting therapeutic cloning.

There are no doubts that therapeutic cloning may cause conflicts to arise. UN has already banned this type of cloning using human embryos. However there are still countries like USA which totally ban both therapeutic and human cloning and strongly emphasize on total ban on both the latter clonings. This is because they consider embyos as human and feel that these embryos deserve respect. They claim that pro-lifers ignore the pain of the living for the sake of some embryo. Moreover, there are come religions like Catholicism and Protestantism which do not support cloning. The followers of these religion commented that therapeutic cloning which involves embryonic stem-cell research - like abortion, which requires the culling of embyros - is morally unacceptable.

Richard Nicholson of the British Bulletin of Medical Ethics has once said that cloning research may well be ‘sowing the seeds of our destruction.’ I disagree with his statement. Till now, there is no concrete evidence of the tremendous harm therapeutic cloning using stem cells can inflict.

Therefore, if me or my loved ones are stricken with an illness and my only hope of being cured is therapeutic cloning, I will still go for it.

Would you buy products that contain GM foods for consumption by your family? Why or why not?

Yes, I will still buy products that contain GM foods for consumption by my family members.

Again, as mentioned in the earlier blog, there are many potential benefits in a consumer perspective. Medicines and vaccines are costly to produce. With edible vaccines developed in tomatoes and potatoes, these vaccines will be much easier to ship, store and administer than traditional injectable vaccines. This means that we can get our vaccines for certain disesses much easier and cheaper.

GM crops are herbicide and insect resistant. This means that the food we eat are safer and will most probably not contain anymore pesticides or herbicides that will endanger our health and lives. We will also not find any insects wriggling out from the fruits that will disgust us and make us puke. Therefore GM foods provide another alternative to people who are more health conscious.

Most importantly, my family has been eating GM food for the past few years and we are still fit and well. Though there are articles that say that toxins are found in mice after eating GM potatoes, to replace human beings with mices is not a very good or reliable method iin proving whether GM food is harmful. However, if we have to use laboratory animals as gauges, there are still experiments that can prove that GM food have no harmful effects. One example is the experiment on the GM peas where the nutritional value of diets containing GM peas expressing bean alpha-amylase inhibitor when fed to rats for ten days at two different (30% or 60%) dietary inclusions, was shown to be similar to that of parent-line peas. Thus this shows that GM foods are safe and hence its product should be safe.

Therefore, I will still buy the products that contain GM foods for consumption by my family due to the above reasons.

As one of the country's decision makers, would you advocate the use of GM crops? Why or why not?

Yes, I will support the use of GM crops.

As consumers, we will tend to benefit. Medicines and vaccines often are costly to produce and sometimes require special storage conditions which may not be readily available in third world countries. If edible vaccines are developed in tomatoes and potatoes, the vaccines will be much easier to ship, store, and administer than traditional injectable vaccines. One example is the GM rice plants where they can produce the hepatitis antibody, which can be used to produce immunity to the virus(as reported by The Daily Yomiuri). As rice is a necessity to Asians, the production of GM rice can help reduce the costs of producing medicine or vaccines. The money which is to be used in production of medicines initially can then be channelled and used in other areas.

In religious point of view, GM crops are halal. This has been determined by the Islamic Jurisprudence Council (IJC). Though there is still discussion about the position of crops into which DNA from forbidden foods has been incorporated, all biotechnology derived foods on the market are from approved sources. The IJC position is supported by the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America (IFANCA), and the IFANCA certification is accepted by Islamic organisations in Indonesia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. So, for Muslims, they should have no fear for any GM food. As for other religions, use of GM foods may not be a big problem. Since the Buddhist, Hindus and Sikh support stem cell research, they should also be advocating GM food, which is also a product of ES cell research.

Moreover, if I am one of the decision maker in a third country, I will definitely support the use of GM crops because one of the major problem that I as a decision maker must solve is malnutrition. Since GM food can produce greater yield, which means that farmers can produce more fom the same area of land, and also provide certain vitamins that my people lack, I see no reason in not supporting GM food. Furthermore, GM crops are herbicide tolerant and insect resistant. They can offer farmers simpler control of otherwise difficult to control related weeds and huge environmental benefits as farmers move to low or zero ploughing. This protects soil biodiversity, helps reduce energy use and CO2 emissions.

Though there are debates that GM crops are harmful to human health such that they can cause allergenicity and other unknown effects, the benifits of GM crops are a wholesome that as a decision maker in the counrty, I will not resist the use of GM food.