The 50 Best Inventions of 2009

"Fifty years hence ... we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." When Winston Churchill wrote those words in 1932, in vitro meat was science fiction. Now a team of Dutch scientists is closing in on culturing stem cells from pigs and growing muscle in a petri dish. The in vitro meat project is the brainchild of Willem van Eelen, a Dutch businessman who nearly starved to death in a Japanese prison camp and became convinced that artificial meat would solve world hunger.