Kirsty Spalding never expected to start her biology postdoc standing in a Swedish slaughterhouse, dressed in white overalls and rubber boots amidst blood and gore and stink, while smashing the teeth out of decapitated horses' heads with a hammer. But that's exactly where the young Australian scientist found herself, every second Tuesday in 2002 for two months at the beginning of her postdoc in the lab of Jonas Frisén, a stem cell researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.












