G. William Skinner, 1925–2008

William P . Hanage , Brian G . Spratt , Katherine

A central problem in understanding bacterial speciation is how clusters of closely related strains emerge and persist in the face of recombination. We use a neutral Fisher–Wright model in which genotypes, defined by the alleles at 140 house-keeping loci, change in each generation by mutation or recombination, and examine conditions in which an initially uniform population gives rise to resolved...

Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942)

In 1942, the United States Supreme Court Case of Skinner v. Oklahoma ruled that states could not legally sterilize those inmates of prisons deemed habitual criminals. Skinner v. Oklahoma was about the case of Jack Skinner, an inmate of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, who was subject to sterilization [3] under the Oklahoma Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act of 1935. The ...

Response to Kreuter and Skinner.

I want to commend Matt Kreuter and Celette appropriately labeled ‘targeted’ interventions. Unfortunately, although we would now never call Skinner for their Editorial entitled ‘Tailoring: Clear Horizons a tailored program, in the evolution what’s in a name?’ (Kreuter and Skinner, 2000). of terminology, the titles of our papers stand. I could not agree more with their argument that I commend the...

Circular No . 45 STATE OF ILLINOIS WILLIAM G . STRATTON

William P . Hanage , Christophe Fraser and Brian G . Spratt *

Whatever else they should share, strains of bacteria assigned to the same species should have housekeeping genes that are similar in sequence. Single gene sequences (or rRNA gene sequences) have very few informative sites to resolve the strains of closely related species, and relationships among similar species may be confounded by interspecies recombination. A more promising approach (multiloc...