Today Coronavirus Or Shortened To Covid Is An Everyday Word,

but there was a time some 50 years ago when it was not known,

when June Almeida peered into her electron microscope in 1964, she saw a round, grey dot covered in tiny spokes. She and her colleagues noted that the pegs formed a halo around the virus—much like the sun’s corona, above scientist June Almeida operates an electron microscope in 1963 at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto, Canada. One year later, Almeida would become the first person to see a coronavirus using microscope techniques she developed, photograph by Norman James, Toronto Star/Getty, what she saw would become known as the coronavirus, and Almeida played a pivotal role in identifying it. That feat was all the more remarkable because the 34-year-old scientist never completed her formal education, born June Hart, she lived with her family in a tenement building in Glasgow, Scotland, where her father worked as a bus driver. June was a bright student with ambitions to attend university, but money was scarce. At 16, she dropped out of school and started working as a lab technician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where she used microscopes to help analyse tissue samples, after moving to a similar job at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, she met the man who would become her husband, Venezuelan artist Enriques Almeida. The pair immigrated to Canada, and June got a job working with electron microscopes at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. There she developed new techniques and published several papers describing the structures of viruses previously unseen, what an amazing discovery for someone that never completed her formal training, also amazingly before her death in 2007 at the age of 77, Almeida returned to St. Thomas as an advisor and helped publish some of the first high-quality images of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. for the full fascinating story have a look here.