Equal Opportunity

Equal Opportunity.

Equal opportunity for all.

By sequencing tens of millions of TCRa transcripts from naive mouse CD8 T cells, Genolet et al (2012) show that the TCRa repertoire is at least as diverse as the TCRb repertoire. This overturns a long held view in the field that recombination of the Tcra locus occurs in a co-ordinate sequential bidirectional manner that relies on proximity of Va and Ja gene segments. The observation that rearra...

Tobacco: an equal-opportunity killer?

In their article, Jamrozik et al (see page 258) have explored the mortality hazard associated with smoking by gender and provide evidence that Australian men and women with similar smoking histories (namely, cigarettes smoked per day and time since quit) experience similar rates of death from smoking. Given the limitations of the data in this study, caution should be used in interpreting these ...

Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and Equal Opportunity

Is Primatology an Equal-Opportunity Discipline?

The proportion of women occupying academic positions in biological sciences has increased in the past few decades, but women are still under-represented in senior academic ranks compared to their male colleagues. Primatology has been often singled out as a model of "equal-opportunity" discipline because of the common perception that women are more represented in Primatology than in similar fiel...