A Woman to Know: June Almeida
Attention to detail, patience and persistence. June Almeida had those qualities in spades. — Kenneth McIntosh
Attention to detail, patience and persistence. June Almeida had those qualities in spades. — Kenneth McIntosh
(image via Wikimedia Commons)
June grew up in Scotland but later worked in London and Toronto, honing her mastery with the electron microscope and identifying an entirely new world of cells and viruses. In 1966, when she was just 34, she discovered the first human coronavirus.
She even wrote a brief poem to her virus, “with apologies to William Blake,” in homage to one of his famous verses:
Virus, Virus, shining bright,
In the phosphotungstic night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fivefold symmetry.
She died in 2007, 13 years before the human coronavirus would change the world.
Add to your library list:
June Almeida: Virus Detective (Suzanne Slade)
Cold Wars: The Fight Against the Common Cold (Harold Ellis)
Read more:
Overlooked No More: June Almeida (The New York Times)
June Almeida (The Sunday Times)
June Almeida is finally getting acknowledgment for discovering coronavirus decades ago (National Geographic)
An unlikely path to discovering coronavirus (The Washington Post)
Meet the unsung virologist (Nature)
June Almeida first discovered coronavirus in the 1960s (Medium)
Hear more:
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