Margarita Salas Has Died
She changed criminology, forensics, archeology and oncology forever with her invention of the Multiple Displacement Amplification (MDA) technique to amplify DNA present on any sample, even if present in tiny amounts, leading to recover longer chains than PCR technique and with less errors. Both MDA and PCR techniques have pros and cons and coexisted perfectly leading to a new age of criminology studies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_displacement_amplification
PCR was developped by the US biochemist Kary Mullis, that also died in 2019 exactly three months before Salas, at 74 yo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction
Salas Worked in New York University with Severo Ochoa and in several Spanish scientific institutions. She published more than 300 scientific articles and supervised around 28 PhD Thesis in the fields of biochemistry and molecular biology.
She was the first Spanish woman to become a member of the National Academy of Science in United States.