Tributes to ‘brilliant’ Glasgow Uni scientist

His organs were failing and the 34-year-old school teacher was ­begging her husband not to leave.

The brilliant scientist had returned to his home country after working at the University of Glasgow studying flesh eating diseases.

In late January, he was struck down with coronavirus symptoms, but multiple negative tests left ­doctors befuddled.

At 5.30am on February 6, just days after that conversation in the ambulance, Morvyn held Hector’s hand as he took his last breath.

He was 43-years-old.

“On January 5, we were on the beach with a Bucks Fizz toasting to eight years of marriage,” Morvyn, from Paisley, said.

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“Just a month and a day later, he was dead. That’s unbelievable to me.”

The pair had met 11 years prior in May 2010 when Morvyn was studying in Liverpool.

She was dancing at a bar and spotted the tall, dark-haired Hector when the music stopped. He was shouting “bravo” and begging for another song.

It was love at first sight.

She said: “I just thought ‘who is this guy?’. I was all over it.

“I speak Spanish, too, so I walked over and he just couldn’t believe I was Scottish.

“I had learned Spanish during a year in Peru where I worked at an orphanage and he was really ­impressed with my accent.”

Hector followed Morvyn home and soon began work at the West End university’s Welcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology, where he carried out research into the parasitic disease Leishmaniasis.

The illness is carried by sand flies and eats away at the flesh of its victims.

It’s classed as a neglected tropical disease due to the lack of academic study surrounding it since it was uncovered by a Glaswegian doctor in 1901.

“He was so clever and so passionate about what he does and people were just fascinated by it,” Morvyn said.

“He was such a good orator, too. You know sometimes you can get people who are really smart, but dead boring? He wasn’t like that.

“He was very good looking, very charming, very fun – I fell in love right away.”

The pair wed in the Glasgow Art Club with a Mexican-Scottish mash up, including a piper and a mariachi band.

They continued to blur their two cultures with Mayan ceremonial aspects, which included ­exchanging the four elements.

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Morvyn admits their wedding ceremony was “way too long” ­because of how much they enjoyed sharing their vows – and teasing each other with Morvyn demanding Hector and his best man perform an ­impromptu dance and Mexican flute rendition before she would ­accept the final element.

Of course he obliged, much to his best man’s dismay.

After enjoying life in Glasgow, Hector received an offer of a permanent position researching the Leishmaniasis disease in his home country.

“It was like striking gold,” ­Morvyn explains.

She had followed him to Rio de Janeiro for his research years prior and, in 2017, she followed him home to Mexico.

“He’s my soulmate. I’d follow him anywhere,” she said.

Just weeks ago the pair developed a bad cold which left them unable to do much other than work and eat.

Morvyn began to feel better ­after a few days, but Hector began to experience further symptoms.

When he began struggling to breath, she rushed him to hospital, where doctors initially dismissed it as a panic attack.

The following day, Morvyn attended a third hospital who confirmed it was acute pancreatitis.

Hector’s body had stopped ­producing insulin and his glucose levels were similar to that of a ­diabetic coma, despite not having diabetes. He was in desperate need of intensive care.

“There’s no NHS, so you have to phone round all these hospitals to find one that will take his insurance and has space,” she said.

“Eventually, we got one and then we had to arrange our own ambulance. I was just begging him not to leave me and he was saying ‘si, mi amor’.”

When they arrived at the hospital, doctors realised his situation was much worse than they had thought and he was placed in a coma while Morvyn fought with unyielding insurance firms.

That’s when her friends in Scotland stepped in. Good pal Alex Bowie rallied behind the couple with a GoFundMe page to help ­cover expenses.

The fun-loving scientist’s popularity was realised when donations shot up to almost £60,000 in just days.

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Sadly, Hector’s condition worsened and a massive brain bleed saw Morvyn and his family make the heartbreaking decision to terminate his life support.

She said: “Everyone loves him. He’s just a great, great guy.

“He found commonality with everyone. We’d get in a taxi and he’d say ‘alright, mate’ in this Glaswegian accent ... I really don’t know how to be without him.”