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An article in Nature News (online Feb 24, 2009) raises the possibility of legal challenges to an Obama executive order and that there might be a need for accompanying legislation. see: Stem-cell inaction prompts concern Legal complexities may underlie the delay in fulfilling election pledge. http://www.nature.com/news/2009/0902.../4571068a.html excerpt: "Some Washington insiders suggest that there is no more to the delay than a president consumed by a major economic crisis. Others note that the new administration had (at the time Nature went to press) yet to install a National Institutes of Health (NIH) director or secretary of health and human services — key people the president will need to rely on to enact an executive order and serve as the public face of the administration on a controversial issue. Yet others contend that Obama's lack of action five weeks into his presidency highlights the complexity of the legal issues involved in reversing the Bush ban, which limited federal funding for stem-cell research to a score of lines derived before 9 August 2001. Louis Guenin, a lecturer on ethics at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believes that an Obama executive order could be successfully challenged in court in the absence of enacted legislation explicitly approving federal funding for stem-cell research. That, he says, is because of the Dickey–Wicker amendment: a law first enacted by Congress in 1995 and renewed each year since, which prohibits US funding of research in which embryos are created or destroyed. " The article states some of the top stem cell researchers such as George Daley and John Gearhart are now looking into the legal issues. _._,_.___ __,_._,___ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn