But much of the work is provocative and, depending on your Brave New World tolerance, disturbing: creating "victimless" meat by growing tiny steaks from biopsied frog cells and then eating the steaks.

'Victimless' beef, chicken or fish grown in the laboratory could one day make its way into kitchens on Earth and in space

Good news for all those lusting over a bloody steak but wanting to spare the cow — tissue engineers are trying to grow meat in a lab dish.

Astronauts will get to sample it first: The work is aimed at developing food for long space journeys. …

One researcher recalls a vegan student who asked if she could just biopsy herself, grow a steak and eat it.

If you want truly victimless meat, perhaps it is time to put yourself on the menu.

Dinner party recipes don't come much weirder than this. Working in a tissue culture lab installed in a French art gallery, conceptual artists Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben Ary will lovingly coax frog muscle precursor cells to grow into a miniature frog steak. Each day, the artists will "feed the food"; giving nutrients to the growing steak as well as feeding some live frogs displayed alongside. The pièce de résistance will be a "feast", where the artists, clad in grey chef's uniforms, fry the steak and serve it on a table decked with silver cutlery and crystal goblets. There, watched curiously by an entourage of ribbiting frogs, they will solemnly eat it.

"Disembodied Cuisine" opens at France's National Culture Centre in Nantes in March next year as an exploration of "victimless" meat consumption.