June Almeida: the woman who discovered the 1st coronavirus

June Almeida, the woman who discovered the first coronavirus . The woman who discovered the first human coronavirus was the daughter of a Scottish bus driver who left school at 16.

June Almeida then became a pioneer in viral imaging, the work of which was brought to light during the current pandemic.

Covid-19 is a new virus, but it is a coronavirus of the type first identified by Dr. Almeida in 1964 in his laboratory at St Thomas Hospital in London.

The virologist was born in 1930 and grew up in a poor neighborhood northeast of Glasgow, in Soctland.

She left school with little formal education but got a job as a laboratory technician in histopathology at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

Later, she moved to London to pursue her career and in 1954 married Enriques Almeida, a Venezuelan artist.

Cold research

The couple and their young daughter moved to Toronto, Canada, and according to medical writer George Winter, it was at the Ontario Cancer Institute that Dr. Almeida developed his exceptional skills with an electron microscope.

She has developed a method to better visualize viruses by using antibodies to aggregate them.

Winter told the BBC that her talents are recognized in the United Kingdom and that she was drawn in 1964 to work at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London, the same hospital that treated Prime Minister Boris Johnson when ‘he had the Covid-19 virus.

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