The Science Museum of the University of Navarra has produced a new video of the collection "Women in Science", a project whose aim is to make visible, in an accessible and attractive way, the role played by some women scientists. 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 the biochemist 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 "Women in Science" video project is part of the Science Museum's STEM strategy to make the teaching of 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.

Margarita Salas, born in 1938 in Canero (Asturias), studied chemistry in Madrid, where she met Eladio Villanueva, whom she would marry years later, and Severo Ochoa, who transmitted her vocation for biomedical research. She completed her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Dr. Álvaro Sols, and in 1964 -together with her husband- did a postdoctoral stay in the Severo Ochoa laboratory 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. She later became the head of research on phage phi29 -a virus that infects the bacterium Bacillus subtilis-.

Margarita Salas became an internationally renowned scientist. 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 Jaime I Award (1994), the Ramón y Cajal National Research Award (1999) and the European Inventor Award (2019). On December 10, 2019, the CSIC Biological Research Center will be renamed the Margarita Salas Biological Research Center.

Margarita Salas was an example of motivation, creativity, rigor and perseverance for many young Spanish scientists. Proof of this is that she worked in her laboratory until she was 80 years old, just before her death on November 7, 2019.