Word: teething
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...such a phenomenon on that side of the Atlantic that she has even reviewed herself. At 21, she scored a reported $400,000, two-book deal on the strength of 100 pages that she churned out while cramming for finals at Cambridge University. That initial effort became White Teeth (Random House; 448 pages; $24.95), a book that has finally made it to the U.S. side of the ocean and that Smith describes in the British arts magazine Butterfly as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tap-dancing 10-year...
...photographer, and her mother, a model turned child psychoanalyst, divorced when she was 12. Smith took to writing short stories and poetry during an adolescence she describes as "pathologically angst ridden." She hasn't outgrown the angst: her manner is painfully serious, even defensive, despite the success of White Teeth, which she says "just kind of fell...
...novel begins with Archie's suicide attempt, which ends not in death but in holy matrimony to the prettiest young thing in his vicinity. She is Clara Bowden, 19, Jamaican and missing the entire upper deck of her teeth. That is only the literal manifestation of her rootlessness, for she has lost her faith (Jehovah's Witnesses) and loses her mother, who kicks her out upon learning of her miscegenation. Archie and Clara are supposed to save each other. Instead, they spend their lives accommodating an impulsive moment...
...rules we live by--whether they are determined by religion or geography or biology. Immigrants, in particular, face a paradox, for they have broken with the codes of their homeland in search of a better alternative, but the new rules leave them longing for the old rules. White Teeth doesn't harangue or choose sides; it sketches characters that hover on the human edge of caricature. The novel is so sprawling, so audacious, that at times it feels as if Smith has lost control. "It could have done with a huge amount of editing," she concedes...
Stem cells derived from embryos, on the other hand, can become just about anything--from teeth to muscle to neurons. In fact, they're so strongly primed to differentiate that scientists have a tough time keeping them in their original state. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin was the first to pull off the feat in 1998. He now has an entire tissue bank of stem cells that he hopes one day to turn into specialized tissue almost at will--eliminating the need for fresh embryos...