Margaret Salas

Researcher Margarita Salas

In the world of science and research, there have been women who have made great strides and made great strides. One of them is Margaret Salas. Together with her husband, she started the development of molecular biology in Spain. His studies have focused on the bacterial virus Phi29 and have allowed us to know how DNA works. Thanks to his instructions we know that they are transformed into proteins and how proteins are related to each other to form a functional virus.

In this article we are going to tell you all the biography and scientific contributions of Margarita Salas.

Biography of Margarita Salas

Spanish scientists

Likewise, this woman defines herself as a simple and hard-working person. He is a lover of modern painting and sculpture. Among her virtues she has a need to be honest and her favorite landscapes is the laboratory behind the Asturian countryside. He always claims that the laboratory is where you can forget about the rest of the world. He was born in 1938 in a town on the Asturian coast called Canero. Regarding your training, their parents were very clear that their children had to do a university degree.

He did not have any type of discrimination with respect to his brother, since they were three brothers. Margarita Salas entered a nuns' college at the age of three and continued until she finished high school. At the center they had a fairly complete training in both the humanities and the sciences. Although he liked both, he began to delve deeper into science education. He chose to go to Madrid to study a selective course that included physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and geology. All these subjects had to be passed in order to obtain a degree in chemistry.

Margarita was not enthusiastic about geology and did not need this branch to be able to do medicine. Everything that he studied allowed him to do both studies and he finally decided on chemistry. It was a good choice, since he realized how excited he was to spend hours in the organic chemistry lab. One of his best known phrases is that of «The scientific vocation is not born, it is made».

Margarita Salas met Severo Ochoa and he suggested that she accompany him to a conference on the investigation. In this talk by experts, another action for biochemistry. In the fourth year of the degree he met the one who would be the love of his life called Eladio Viñuela. He is an intelligent, handsome and interesting man with multiple interests. At that time the degree was very descriptive and her husband Eladio liked genetics. Both of them immediately liked each other and when they finished their studies they became boyfriends.

Studies and research

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Eladio began pursuing a doctorate in genetics at the same biological research center as her. However, he realized that the type of genetics that he was studying was actually the one he liked best. He was interested in genetics more adapted to biochemistry, the nucleus of the study being more molecular. Consequently, he asked him to do the thesis together. They got married in 1963 and they were able to carry out the thesis thanks to a decade that consisted of 12000 of the old pesetas.

At the end of all the work that they were developing in Sols' laboratory, they decided to follow the advice that Severo Ochoa had given them. They moved to a laboratory that he had in New York and they were able to make their wishes come true thanks to the scholarships and financial support they were given. In this laboratory, she never felt discriminated against for being a woman. All parrots had the recognition they deserved. After several years in this laboratory they decided to return to Spain to be able to develop molecular biology here. They were aware that they could be found in an area where scientific interest was less and then it was impossible to investigate. In this situation, they would return to the United States.

The first important question they raised was the choice of the topic of the work on what they wanted to investigate and advance. They not only intended to continue with the investigations they had had in Ochoa's laboratory, since in Spain they could not compete with this center. Thus, they chose the Phi29 phage, which were quite complex morphologically. This phage is nothing more than a virus that infects bacteria. This study seemed quite interesting to him, since it is a virus that had given rise to the first contributions in molecular genetics in the XNUMXs.

The objective of both was to unravel all the mechanisms that viruses used for their morphogenesis. That is, how the virus particles formed from the components. We know that the main components are proteins and genetic material. Apart from meeting the objective, they needed foreign capital. Given that Spain had no money for research, Severo Ochoa he got them funding to be the only researchers in a laboratory that they had to equip little by little.

Margarita Salas's contributions to science

research and science

In Spain, Margarita Salas felt discriminated against for being a woman. In the laboratory he had no problem with the doctoral students, but from the outside of the laboratory it was only Eladio Viñuela's wife. This was terribly unfair, as she too had her merit. To end this discrimination, an investigation began in the XNUMXs on the African swine fever virus. The Phi29 research was exclusively under the direction of Margarita. This is how she was able to show that she was able to carry out the research by herself without the need for Eladio and became a scientist with her own name and not just "the wife of.

It was known that it is a virus and it did not play for man but that it infects bacteria Bacillus subtilis. The first thing that could be discovered thanks to Margarita Salas was that DNA has an essential protein attached to its ends so that it can begin to duplicate it. It was the first time that such a protein could be found bound to the DNA of a living being. All this was a discovery in a new mechanism for the replication of genetic material. Thanks to these discoveries, it has been possible to use a model to analyze other viruses that also have this type of protein. All these videos are usually of a worse handling, so this advance has been quite relevant.

I hope that with this information you can learn more about Margarita Salas and her biography.


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