This is June Almeida, born 5th October
1930.
You probably haven’t heard anything about her, her
name will not be familiar to you.
She was born June Dalzeil (pronounced De ell) Hart,
in Glasgow where her Dad used to drive the old red corporation buses.
As most women did in those days, she left school at
16 and began work as a lowly lab technician at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. She
was a very bright student and progressed quickly, taking her promotion and
moving down south to work at St Barts in London. While working in London she met her husband
Enrique, an artist from Venezuela and together they decided the UK was not for
them and emigrated to Canada. Not long
after that she started work at the
Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto, completing her PhD in science.
She returned to London around 1962 and started
working at St Thomas’s hospital where she was developing a truly innovative
method of diagnostics using an electron microscope (the IEM). June was the
first one to ‘see’ rubella, the virus that causes German Measles. Latterly, her work became of extreme importance
in the research of both hepatitis and HIV.
She also was the first person to see and identify a new
virus that slipped under the radar before, and in 1967 she published a research
paper on this virus. The virus had a halo, which she thought was rather like
the ring of light around the sun. So she
thought of the halo, and the golden sun and the Latin for the word crown.
She called it the corona virus,
Why don’t we know her better? Why doesn’t everybody know
her name?
Although with the average intellect of the social media
conspirators, she’d probably be vilified for creating the corona virus in the
first place.
I’m glad to say that June lived a very long and happy
life; she restored antiques and did a bit of yoga teaching in her spare time in
her retirement.
The new covid 19 testing lab at St Thomas’s is named
after her.
I’d love to take her out for a coffee and talk about bus routes, the bats, the pangolins and some poor woman called Astrid Zeneca
Caro
Posts
Amazing how many people - especially women - there are that we don't know about who made significant contributions to mankind. On the other hand, we all know the names of generals, many of whom did little more than getting a lot of soldiers killed unnecessarily.
ReplyDeleteI think her name is becoming very well known now, for the obvious and tragic reason.
ReplyDeleteAnother woman who made such a major contribution to all, and of whom most haven't heard. Thanks for bringing her to my notice
ReplyDelete