A school drop out was the first to discover coronavirus

PTI: Dr. June Almeida was the first person to have discovered coronavirus. June Hart, born in 1930, was the daughter of a Scottish bus driver. She dropped out of school at the age of 16 and went on to become a pioneer of virus imaging. Her work has come roaring back into focus during the present pandemic. Covid-19 is a new illness but it is caused by a coronavirus of the type first identified by Dr Almeida in 1964 at her laboratory in St Thomas’s Hospital in London. After leaving school, she got a job as a laboratory technician in histopathology at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Later she moved to London to further her career and in 1954 married Enriques Almeida, a Venezuelan artist. The virologist died in 2007, at the age of 77. Now 13 years after her demise, she is finally getting recognition she once deserved as a pioneer whose work speeded up understanding of the virus that is currently spreading across the world.