Hello I'm Kirstie 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 the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a scientist. The contribution he's made to our

understanding of one of nature's greatest secrets, the structure of protein, is

enormous. Indeed he's won the Nobel Prize for it. He first came to Britain from Vienna as a young man in the 1930s,

but his studies at Cambridge were interrupted by the war when he was interned as an enemy alien.

It was after that in a unit that included Crick and

Watson who discovered DNA that he began work on protein crystallography, the

science which helps us understand the very chemistry of life.

A prolific writer and a passionate advocate of science in the pursuit of knowledge

he can say of himself at the age of 86,

I'm still very ambitious.

I like to solve problems. He is Max Peruts and not just ordinary

problems I think I'm right in saying Max that you set out age 22 saying that you wanted to solve the secret of life.

That's right, yes.

But how did you know what the secret of life was?

The work of the living cell, all the chemistry of the living cell depends on proteins. But in the 1930s, very

little was known about them. The basic chemistry was known, but people had no idea about the structure, they had no idea how they worked.

But how would you, why would you, a young man of 22, set your sights on such an enormous problem.

What made you the kind of person who wanted to do that thing?

I think I was foolish and optimistic thinking that I could tackle this,

but my fellow graduate students thought it was mad to try such

...