Ada Yonath: 'I never wanted to be a scientist'

My first experiment was when I was five. The question was really stupid: the distance from the floor to the ceiling. We were three families in a four room apartment, one kitchen and one bathroom, so the only place I could do my experiment was the balcony. I put together all the furniture I could carry – a table, a chair, a stool or whatever. It didn’t reach the ceiling. I decided to stand on them all and collect the numbers. I never reached the ceiling: I reached the ground floor. I ended up with 17 fractures and was in a cast for three months. I came back to the same house 65 years later. I asked the people who lived there if I could measure their balcony. They let me in, but they’d remodelled so I never got the result.