At the start of joining Professor Satyendra Nath Bose, she had scoured surplus army equipment sold as scrap on the footpaths of Calcutta after the Second World War. Purnima Sinha was looking for spare parts to build the X-ray equipment she needed for her doctoral research. We must remember that X-ray techniques were being applied to unravel DNA structure on other side of the globe around 1953. Her research was funded by Assam Oil Company at a time when research-industry collaboration was rare. Not only did she build it, but she also went on to study different types of clay from across India. Later on, Dr Sinha joined the Biophysics Department at Stanford University 's ‘Origin of Life’ project, which had an interface with her work. She compared the X-ray structure of clay with DNA patterns, geometrically, and was fascinated to find a connection.