In "Fight Club," Brad Pitt's character turns human fat into soap and with beautifully sick panache sells it back to the same rich women who'd paid to have it removed by liposuction. Now scientists at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., have shown greater ingenuity and made something rather more lucrative from the same leftover liposuction fat: stem cells.

Until now, it was thought that adult stem cells could only be found in bone marrow. But the Duke researchers found that they could take cells from fat and "reprogram" them to grow into bone, cartilage, fat and nerve cells. Who would have thought that something so potentially useful could come from the sagging bottoms and rolling bellies of American fatties?

Kristen Lott, for one. A fourth-year medical student at Duke, Lott recently announced her lab's results at the 50th annual scientific meeting of the Orthopedic Research Society in San Francisco.