"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.