Dr. Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas

AMALIA KOUTSOURI-VOUREKAS

Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, Lady Fleming (1912 - 26 February 1986,) was a Greek doctor, activist and politician. She was born in Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1912. She moved to Greece and, during the Axis occupation, took part in the National Resistance, for which she was jailed by the Italians.

In 1946, she received a scholarship to study in London. There, she met Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. After his wife died in 1949, she married him in 1953, becoming the second Lady Fleming. She was widowed less than two years later, in March 1955.

She returned to Greece in 1963 and was arrested by the Greek junta during the period of the dictatorship (1967-1974) for acts of sabotage. She was released from prison due to health problems in 1971 but was stripped of her Greek citizenship and exiled. While in exile, she wrote a "A Piece of Truth," a personal account of her imprisonment as well as of the trial of Alexandros Panagoulis.

Lady Fleming returned to Greece after the fall of the junta in 1974. She joined PASOK and was elected to the Greek Parliament in 1977, 1981 and 1985. She also was active in several human rights organisations, notably Amnesty International, Democratic Concern, and Human Rights Union.

Fleming initiated and funded the establishment of the Greek Foundation for Basic Biological Research "Alexander Fleming" (1965) which was later transformed to the Biomedical Sciences Research Center "Alexander Fleming", a governmental, non-profit institution which is actively involved in research areas covering immunology, molecular biology, genetics and molecular oncology.

Amalia Fleming died in 1986.

Biographical Summary

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalia_Fleming Wikipedia: Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas