Hello, I'm Kresse Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2009. My castaway this week is the physicist Athena Donald, a Cambridge professor and fellow of the Royal Society, her life's work

has been studying the structure of everyday objects like plastic or food or plants. Her

enthusiasm for a subject is so strong that at her daughter's 11th

birthday party she couldn't resist describing the molecular structure of

melting ice cream. It was a rare case of misjudging her audience.

By her own admission, she was something of a swat at school.

She was younger than anyone else in her year,

and feeling isolated diverted her energies to work.

I knew from essentially my first physics lesson when I was

13 years old that I wanted to study physics. She adds, I don't do things by halves, if I

do something I have to throw myself into it

Athena Donald let me ask you about that lesson then when I said you were

threatened in the physics lesson yes what happened what how did the

epiphany emerge it's really hard to look back that far and be sure.

I just know that once I did separate sciences

and was introduced to physics, it all makes sense to me.

It was just that's what really turns me on and

13 a very significant age for a girl in so far as for most teenage girls they're

starting to emerge into that world of you know make up and music and boys and all of that

sort of stuff I mean did that interest you were or there was only one thing on your

...