I WAS about 19 when a craggy old farmhand leant over the bar where I was working and said: "You're losin' it, son. Them milkers in yon field, they're your best bet."

This was his cure for baldness. You stood in a field in front of a cow, bent forward and persuaded it to lick your pate. Slobbery, leathery, sandpapery, like being slapped by warm piece of thick, wet fish - of course, I never tried it, but I can imagine.

This week, American scientists have announced they are within a whisker of curing baldness. They've discovered that if they graze a mouse's skin and inject into it a protein called wnt (Scrabble players take note, wnt) the skin will heal and new hairs will grow.

Quite why anyone would wish to cure baldness is a mystery. According to research, bald men are more intelligent, virtuous, attractive and generous than the hirsute ones. Some might well add sexy to that list, but I'm not one to boast (bald men are also more than three times as likely to suffer a heart attack due to stress, but we'll gloss over that).

Throughout the ages, though, a cure has been sought as if it were the Hairy Grail. It would indeed be lucrative: 7.4 million Brits and 35 million Americans are baldies.

Hippocrates, the Greek philosopher, recommended an unappetising mixture of pigeon droppings, horseradish, beetroot and cumin be liberally smeared over the hairless head. For centuries since, this guano-based cure has been pursued - another traditional English remedy is paste of either chicken or goose dung applied to the scalp overnight. Not advisable if you like clean pillows.

The Ancient Egyptians used "Cairo Crop", a medicine of dubious efficacy that included the fat of lion, hippopotamus, crocodile, cat, snake and ibex that was liberally applied to the non-hairy area.

Cleopatra smeared a paste of ground horses' teeth and deers' bone marrow to the top of Julius Caesar's crown. This was a variation on the hoof-of-horse and toe-of-dog recipe that Egyptian apothecaries also liked mix up.

Queen Victoria was afflicted by alopecia (an interesting word in itself as it comes from the Greek alopex meaning 'fox': when a fox is afflicted by mange its fur drops out). She drank silver birch wine, made from rising sap, to combat it. Her people, for whom the wine was out of reach, made do by walking around with onions and beef marrows stuffed under their large cloth caps in the hope the vegetable matter would stimulate the hairs on their grey matter.

Nowadays we are more sophisticated. In the 1980s, when the luxuriantly-locked were prancing about in leg warmers, the fox-mange sufferers were hanging upside down in a £360 inverter machine so that their blood rushed to their bonce.

In Canada, you can buy a dome-shaped hairdrier that zaps your head with electrical pulses. A German scientist recommends 60 cups of coffee a day as he has discovered that caffeine acts as barrier to the male hormone, dihydrotestosterone, which damages the hair cells.

Other people recommend a foreign holiday as in hot weather hair grows faster and thicker. This overlooks two factors: firstly, there are more bald Greeks per head of population than anywhere else in the world and, secondly, most bald men return from a week in the sun with a patch as red as a baboon's bottom.

So, as they say in Belgium, "experience is the comb nature gives us when we are bald". Or, as they say in my house, "a hair in the head is worth two in the brush". Unless, of course, you have a friendly Friesian to fertilise your follicles.