figurehead, say they have now grown in vitro meat successfully for the first time in the laboratory.

When I visited Mark Post, one of the team's lead scientists, at his lab at the University of Technology in Eindhoven earlier this year, he showed me the plastic dishes in which the meat cells, originally taken from a pig foetus, were being grown. Inside was a pink liquid he described as having the texture of "an undercooked egg". It had yet to be "exercised" via electrical stimulation into a muscle-type texture. Not exactly a pork chop with herb butter, but I said I was willing to taste the future.

Alas, he declined. Wait a few years, he said, and he should have got to the stage where long strips of it canLast week was Girls' Movie Night at our house. All the boys were indisposed in one manner or another, so we chose Mona Lisa Smile , a 2003 release that has been called the Dead Poets Society for women. Set in 1953 at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, it is a study of that odd period of time where women had returned to the traditional roles of homemaker after having enjoyed independence filling in for the men who were fighting World War II. Julia Roberts plays a forward-looking rookie instructor who feels compelled to show her intelligent young charges that they can be anything they want to be, despite society's plan to keep them serving only as wife and mother.

While I enjoyed the movie for its (I think) accurate