Professorial lecture : to clone or not to clone - and other ethical Issues In pharmacy and medicine / Abu Bakar bin Abdul Majeed.

In the last fifty years or so, advances in biotechnology, pharmacy
and medicine have led to the introduction of novel and innovative
products and procedures. Although these discoveries have provided
benefits to patients, they have also created new ethical conundrums.
Issues like human cloning, artificial reproductive technologies,
genetic engineering, organ donation and transplant, stem cells
research and euthanasia are becoming more pertinent and require
a judicious approach to appease both practitioners and patients.
The practice of pharmacy and medicine also requires a strong
subscription to specific code of ethics. The discipline of bioethics,
which encompasses medical ethics and pharmacoethics, has been
introduced to provide an avenue for discussions on ethical practices
in biotechnology, pharmacy and medicine. Bioethics can be defined
as the study of the rightness and wrongness of acts performed
within the discipline of life science, through the application of
both ethical theory and case study method. The various moral
questions pertaining to biotechnology, pharmacy and medicine
in the contemporary world demand the adoption of applied ethics
using ethical principles to solve real-life problems. However,
simply adopting applied ethics based on secular approach may not
be ideal. We must move effectively toward forging a meaningful
dialogue between bioethics and religion, sometimes separated by a vast gap of misunderstanding, and mistrust and miscommunication.
Religious principles and prescriptions must be the foundation for
discussing ethical issues as the reason for religion's presence rests
deep in the being of a species. It is to be argued that Muslims, for
example, expect ethical solutions that are based on the principles
of the shariah or Islamic law. By subscribing to this approach, in
Islam ethical issues like therapeutic cloning, organ donation and
transplant, and artificial insemination appear to have been mostly
settled.