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John Almeida at the Ontario Cancer Center in 1963
The daughter of a Scottish bus driver was the one who discovered the first human immunodeficiency virus, Corona, and dropped out of school at age sixteen.
Joan Almeida has become a pioneer in the field of virus imaging, and today her work is once again the center of attention during the current epidemic.
Covid-19 is a new virus, but it belongs to the Coruña family of viruses. Dr. Almeida was the first person to be diagnosed in 1964 with his laboratory at St. Thomas Hospital in the British capital, London.
The virologist, whose name was John Hart, was born in 1930 and grew up in an apartment building near Alexandra Park in northeast Glasgow.
She dropped out of school and had not yet received some formal education, but found work as an assistant professor of histology at the University of Glasgow Royal Invermary.
Then he moved to London, appealing to develop his career. In 1954 she married a Venezuelan artist named Enrique Almeida.
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The couple moved with their daughter to the Canadian city of Toronto, and at the Ontario Cancer Center, Dr. Almeida developed her unique skills in using an electron microscope, says medical writer George Winter.
Gwon has pioneered a way to better visualize viruses, using antibodies to synthesize them.
In an interview with BBC Radio, George Winter said that his talent had been drawn to Britain, that he had been tempted to return in 1964 and work at St James Hospital in London, the same hospital that treated British Prime Minister Boris. Johnson, who suffered from a Covid virus. 19)
Upon his return, he began collaborating with Dr. David Terrell, who was investigating the Salisbury Cold Unit.
According to author George Winter, Dr. Terrell was examining voluntary nose samples, and when the laboratory implanted these samples, the research team extracted quite a few, but not all, common viruses associated with the common cold.
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One of the samples was taken from a student at a boarding school in Surrey in 1960, and later known as B814. The research team found that the viruses isolated from it could transmit symptoms of normal colds to the volunteers, but were unable to implant and grow them in the cell laboratory.
It was later learned that it could grow and grow in animal organ tissue cells, and Dr. Terrell asked if it could be seen through an electron microscope.
Dr. Terrell sent samples of it to Gwen Almeida, who saw the virus particles in the samples and described them as influenza viruses, but not exactly the same.
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A halo or corona surrounds the virus, which is why it is known as the Corona virus.
And he was able to determine what became known as the first human virus to infect Corona.
Dr. Winter says that Almeida had already seen those particles while studying hepatitis in mice and infectious bronchitis in chickens.
But his study, which was submitted to a scientific journal, was rejected “because the referees said the images it produced were bad (unclear) images of the flu virus particles.”
However, in 1965, the British Medical Journal wrote in detail about the new discovery and the virus strain detected in sample B814, and two years later, the Journal of General Virology published the first images of what Dr. Gwen had viewed.
Winter noted that Dr. Terrell and Dr. Almeida and Professor Tony Waterson, an official at St. Thomas Hospital, have called the new virus Corona, because of the corona or aura surrounding the virus, as shown in the image.
He later worked in the Department of Postgraduate Studies at the London Faculty of Medicine, where he earned his PhD.
The end of his career was at the Wellcome Center, where he won several patents in the field of virus imaging microscopy.
After leaving the center, Gwen became a yoga instructor, but continued to work as a virology consultant in the late 1980s, when she helped take new photos of HIV.
Gwon died in 2007 and she was 77 years old.
Almost 13 years after her death, she finally received the recognition she deserves as a pioneer, whose research has accelerated the understanding of the virus that is currently spreading worldwide.
