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The controversy surrounding the potential switch of the Plan B emergency contraceptive therapy from prescription to over-thecounter status has been unprecedented. Regulatory, professional, and societal aspects of this issue have been discussed recently and will no doubt continue to be debated. In this editorial, members of the Medicine, Law, and Ethics panel of The Annals of Pharmacotherapy's Editorial Board offer a sampling of viewpoints touching on varying aspects of the controversy. Readers may wish to consider the ramifications of their professional decisions in this and similar situations in advance of having to make such decisions.

Objective: TO review the practice and legal principles of negligence law. Case Summary: An illustrative, fictional case is presented, based in part on facts gleaned from actual case law. A respected pharmacist, faced with the financial loss of his business, decided to engage in 2 creative but unethical schemes to increase his profit margin. In doing so, he violated federal Medicare law and placed a number of the patients who used his services at significant risk for medical complications. Discussion: Negligence law has evolved over the past 30 years in a manner that significantly increases the liability of the practicing pharmacist for both ordinary negligence actions and criminal negligence actions. In addition, the past decade has seen the expansion of Medicare Fraud and Abuse law such that it now represents an increasingly high risk area for every medical service provider, including the pharmacist. Conclusions: Professional practice in the US is highly regulated, governed by both case law and statutory law. Every practicing pharmacist should be aware of the law that governs his or her behavior to avoid both civil and criminal liability.

The amino acid compositions of many of the known sequenced proteins were compared to determine if a relationship exists between the amino acid composition and the amount of sequence homology of these proteins. For this purpose, a function, the composition divergence, was defined. A computer program based on relatively simple assumptions has been successfully used to simulate the data distribution found in comparing composition divergence with the sequence dissimilarity. From this characterization of known proteins, it is possible to predict the sequence homology of unsequenced proteins, based on amino acid composition comparisons. The power and limitations of this technique are discussed.