Eladio Viñuela (1937-1999), the molecular biology pioneer in Spain.

Eladio Viñuela passed away in Madrid, Spain, on 9 March 1999. Born on 15 February 1937, in Ibahernando, a small village in the province of Cáceres (South-western Spain), he received his academic degrees (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) in Chemistry (Biochemistry) at the Complutense University of Madrid. He took his Ph.D. thesis while working in Alberto Sols’ laborator y, and it dealt with glycogen metabolism; he found that liver glucokinase was essentially absent in diabetic patients. For that finding and other studies on other enzymes related to glycogen metabolism like hexokinase and phosphofructokinase, he was awarded the “Leonardo Torres Quevedo” Prize in 1964. Eladio did his postdoctoral training at New York University in the laboratory of Severo Ochoa. There he worked on the replication and translation of bacteriophage MS2 RNA and also made a very interesting observation showing that the proteins translated from a polycistronic messenger RNA start with formylmethionine. Howeve r, his most cited work from that time was one carried out independently in which he described a simple, fast method to determine the molecular weight of proteins. In that work he indicated that the molecular weight of a protein correlates with its electrophoretic mobility in denaturing polyacrylamide gels. Back in Spain he created the first department of molecular biology, together with his wife Margarita Salas, at the National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC), in Madrid. At that time he was dedicated not only to produce excellency in science but also to train molecular biology researchers. For this purpose he worked very hard, without signs of weariness. Eladio taught his students how to be strict in the scientific work, and he tried also to increase their intellectual capacity and their academic knowledge. His attitude was revolutionary to Spanish science, and his students often learned more in five of his seminars than in a whole year at the Faculty of Sciences. That special period of time has been recently remembered with great a ffection by his colleagues and students in a most interesting book on his scientific life*. The book contains many anecdotes and stories indicating not only that Eladio was one of the best scientists of his time, but also that he was an excellent human being. At the same time he continued making very important scientific contributions working with his wife, Ma rgarita Salas, on he morphogenesis of bacteriophag e φ29, a virus with a complex morphology but a very small DNA. In the late 1970s he became interested in another virus, the African swine fever virus (ASFV). By analizing this pathogen, his group became Jesús Ávila