A tale of two metaballs

I have a scene. There are two metaballs in the scene. Is there a way to apply different materials to each? I can’t seem to make it work.

Change the name so they are not part of the same family http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.5/Manual/Modeling/Meta_Objects/Editing
They will not be able to interact as they would previously though