2020_02_10_MUSCIE_salas
Tribute of the Science Museum of the University of Navarra to Margarita Salas
On the occasion of the Day of Girls and Women in Science, it has edited a video about the life of the researcher, who died last November.
The Science Museum of the University of Navarra has produced a new video of the collection "Women in Science", a project whose goal is to make visible, in an accessible and attractive way, the role that some women scientists have played. This video, the fifth in the series, is dedicated to the life of the Spanish scientist Margarita Salas, who died last November.
The Science Museum wants to pay tribute with this biography to the life and work of Biochemistry Margarita Salas, phage phi29 researcher, on the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which is celebrated on February 11.
The project of "Women in Science" videos is part of the Science Museum's STEM strategy to make teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects more appealing, especially to girls and young women. The previous four videos have shed light on the lives of women scientists Alice Catherine Evans, Florence Nightingale, Rachel Carson and Cecilia Payne.
degree program Margarita Salas, born in 1938 in Canero (Asturias), studied Chemical Sciences in Madrid, where she met Eladio Villanueva -whom she would marry years later-, and Severo Ochoa, who transmitted her vocation for biomedical research . She did her doctoral thesis under the direction of Dr. Alvaro Sols, and in 1964 -together with her husband- did a postdoctoral stay at the laboratory Severo Ochoa at New York University. There she discovered that the UAA nucleotide triplet represents a signal for the termination of protein synthesis".
In New York Margarita never felt discriminated against for being a woman, but when she returned to Spain she began to work in the shadow of her husband Eladio Villanueva, with whom she shared a field of study. Later she was in charge of the research of the phage phi29 -a virus that infects the bacterium Bacillus subtilis-.
Margarita Salas became a scientist of reference letter at international level. She was the first woman to direct the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center in Madrid, and to preside the Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Among other awards, she received the award Jaime I (1994), the award Nacional de research Ramón y Cajal (1999) and the award European Inventor (2019). On December 10, 2019, the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del CSIC will be renamed Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas Margarita Salas.
Margarita Salas was an example of motivation, creativity, rigor and perseverance for many young Spanish scientists. sample of this is that she worked on her laboratory until she was 80 years old, just before her death on November 7, 2019.