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.
"It was revolting," says Spalding, who was a vegetarian at the time. "I found the whole thing rather traumatic."
Spalding and Frisén were trying to develop a technique that used signals from radioactive carbon (14C) to determine the age of cells, with the ultimate goal of determining whether neurogenesis took place in the brain. Little did they know that the technique would also reveal the identity of victims of one of ...
