Latest News Clips 2012.10.11

                        Bengo’s Latest News Clips                       2012.10.11

1.      Gee, She Looks Familiar     New York Times    October 5, 2012

LIGHT seems to chase Mamie Gummer wherever she goes. It all but strafed her at the Altuzarra show during New York Fashion Week last month, a barrage of flashbulbs bleaching her skin to a milky translucence. As she took her front-row seat, a dozen photographers bore down on her, turning her visit into an impromptu red-carpet moment.

She responded with actorly reflexes, offering an upturned chin, but making sure all the while to place her program discreetly over the seam of her pencil skirt, which was slit, in her view, a little too high for propriety.

She had risen before dawn to fly in from Vancouver, where she had been working 16-hour days filming “Emily Owens, M.D.,” her television series, which is scheduled for its premiere Oct. 16 on the CW network. But she showed no signs of fatigue, the only chink in her composure a perceptibly tightening smile.

“I’m a little off my game,” she said just as the first model glided down the runway. Under the circumstances, she had little choice, she said, but “to flip a switch and operate in a mode that’s almost preprogrammed.” And to turn on the charm. “You can’t be disgruntled, you can’t be belligerent,” she said. “It’s just not an option.”

It might have been an option a handful of years ago, when Ms. Gummer, with her younger sisters, Grace, an actress, and Louisa, a student, started to become fixtures on Manhattan’s society circuit, invited to film premieres, style-world festivities, store unveilings or, as fashion parlance would have it, the opening of an elevator. “I thought of those events as a lot of fun and treated them like a giant party,” Ms. Gummer said.

“Now I’m learning this is work.”

Like many of her peers in Hollywood, Ms. Gummer, 29, is acutely aware that in an image-obsessed culture, attaining a bankable profile is a 24/7 pursuit. It no longer suffices to snare eye-catching parts or turn up dutifully for the casting calls and after-theater parties, a ritual that was standard in her mother’s day. (Mom, for those who have been living in a yurt, is Meryl Streep. Dad is the sculptor Donald Gummer.)

“This whole idea of making appearances, it’s become a business,” Ms. Gummer said the next afternoon, sitting in a borrowed suite at the NoMad Hotel in the Flatiron district. “You’re vying for people’s focus and attention at a time when it seems anybody can get a little bit of fame.”

2.  Cloning and Stem Cell Work Earns Nobel

The New York Times    October 8, 2012

Two scientists who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday helped lay the foundation for regenerative medicine, the hotly pursued though still distant idea of rebuilding the body with tissues generated from its own cells. They are John B. Gurdon of the University of Cambridge in England and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan.

Their discoveries concern the manipulation of living cells, and lie at the heart of the techniques for cloning animals and generating stem cells, the primitive cells from which the mature tissues of the body develop. Dr. Gurdon was the first to clone an animal, a frog, and Dr. Yamanaka discovered the proteins with which an adult cell can be converted to an egg-like state. The prize was announced in Stockholm.

Both men had to overcome false starts in life. Dr. Gurdon was told as a boy that he was wholly unsuited for biology, and Dr. Yamanaka trained as a surgeon only to find he was not so good at it.

The techniques they developed reach to the beginnings of life, and have generated objections from people who fear, on ethical or religious grounds, that scientists are pressing too far into nature’s mysteries and the ability to create life artificially.

3.  India’s Embrace of Foreign Retailers

The New York Times   October 9, 2012

  

PATNA, India — A long-festering controversy about whether India should allow

foreign retailers like Wal-Mart into the country has often been cast as a battle between millions of small shopkeepers and large corporate interests. But in much of the country, including in this eastern city, the issue often divides Indians as much by age as by their livelihoods.

Those younger than 25, a group that includes about half the country’s 1.2 billion people, appear quite open and eager to try foreign brands and shopping experiences, researchers say. They already while away their afternoons at Western-style malls like the year-old P&M mall here where they try on T-shirts by Benetton, eat pizza from Domino’s and watch movies in a Mexican-owned theater chain, Cinepolis.

Aakash Singh, a 20-year-old college student who recently came to the mall here one afternoon, summed up his generation’s attitude toward foreign retailers this way: “Absolutely, they should come. The country will benefit.”

But many older Indians who came of age in an earlier era of socialist policies say they are not entirely comfortable with the idea of big-box stores and sprawling malls. They worry that foreign companies will siphon profits and business from Indian competitors, forcing millions of family-owned shops to close.