Margarita Salas

A pioneer of molecular biology in Spain, she grew up in Oviedo, in an educated Asturian family that supported the higher education of their daughters. She graduated in Chemistry from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Advised by her relative, the Spanish biochemist Severo Ochoa, then a US citizen and 1959 Nobel Prize in Medicine, she did the research for her doctoral thesis in Madrid under the direction of Alberto Sols, who had returned to Spain in 1956 after several years in the United States. During his postdoctoral stay (1964-1967) in the department that Ochoa directed at New York University, Salas obtained some of the most important achievements of her research: the direction of reading the genetic message, identification of the triplet that stops transcription and initiation factors of protein biosynthesis. These results provided her with a scientific authority from a very young age that was recognized in Spain on her return while the process of initiation of protein synthesis became one of the main research topics of the group led by Ochoa in New York and, then at the Roche Institute.

The selection of the phi-29 virus, an infectious agent of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, enabled Salas and her husband, Eladio Viñuela, to return to Madrid, to the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas of the CSIC, with a research project on the molecular biology of this virus and a grant from the Jane Coffin Child Memorial Foundation, which they obtained with the support of Ochoa and later from the National Institutes of Health (United States). It was a simple-looking virus that became an experimental system that provided many benefits. With her first pre-doctoral fellows Enrique Méndez, Jesús Ávila, Antonio Talavera, Juan Ortín and José Miguel Hermoso, the research began and Margarita Salas became an expert on phages (bacterial viruses) recognized in Spain and abroad. She was one of the first group of women appointed as research professors when these positions were created in 1971 and led her own team since Viñuela became involved in the African swine fever virus.

Later achievements, including the detection of a covalent bond between a protein and a nucleic acid, and a new system of DNA replication precisely through a terminal protein, consolidated her academic authority and international fame. The patent for the in vitro DNA synthesis process, with which she gained additional academic recognition, and which has provided direct benefits to CSIC, was a product of the research of the group he led at the Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa (CBM), based on the action of the DNA polymerase isolated from phi 29 phage. The properties of this polymerase made it a biological tool for amplifying DNA from very small quantities. The process was patented in the United States, at the European Patent Office in Munich, Japan, Spain and Germany, as reported by the virtual museum of Oficina Española de Patentes y Marcas (the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office).

Between 1968 and 1992, Margarita Salas was Professor of Molecular Genetics at the Faculty of Chemistry of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She received honorary doctorates from 10 universities, was director of the CBM, where she worked all her life since its inception in 1975. She was elected an academic of the Royal Academy of Sciences (1988), the Spanish Academy (2001), the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005), the European Organization of Molecular Biology (EMBO) (1983) and president of the Institute of Spain - the first woman and first person specialized in science to receive this appointment since Manuel Lora-Tamayo was appointed during the Franco dictatorship. She received many recognitions, although not the Prince of Asturias prize. Passionate about her work, dedicated to research as a way of life and teacher of several generations dedicated to molecular biology.

María Jesús Santesmases

Instituto de Filosofía, CSIC