Margarita Salas
Spanish molecular biologist (1938-2019), formed in Severo Ochoa's New York laboratory, who introduced molecular biology to Spain and whose phage phi29 research yielded the phi29 DNA polymerase — a highly processive, strand-displacing enzyme whose amplification applications became the most profitable patent in the history of the CSIC. European Inventor Award (lifetime achievement), 2019.
Why this wins its question: Salas is remembered in Spain and nearly invisible in English. This object binds her record to the original 1989 enzyme paper (primary) and a scientific-society obituary, and links her to the Ochoa lineage — Cajal to Ochoa to Salas — that the instance documents end to end.
Claims
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Margarita Salas was born in Asturias in 1938 and died in Madrid on 7 November 2019; encouraged toward biochemistry by Severo Ochoa in 1958, she joined his New York University laboratory in 1964 and worked there on the mechanisms of transcription and translation.
Returning to Spain in 1967, she built her research program on the bacteriophage phi29 and became the main driving force in establishing molecular biology as a discipline in Spain.
Her laboratory showed that phi29 DNA polymerase performs highly processive, strand-displacing DNA synthesis producing chains of more than 70 kilobases — the properties, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 1989, that make the enzyme a tool for isothermal DNA amplification.
The phi29 DNA polymerase patent became the most profitable in the history of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and in June 2019 the European Patent Office gave Salas its lifetime achievement award.