SCIENTIST JUNE ALMEIDA

As our world has gained a sudden and undesired familiarity with the word “coronavirus,” we’ve also been lucky enough to gain an acquaintance with some of the scientists and public health experts that have played a role in establishing the knowledge that’s being used to try to save lives. One of the scientists whose name we’ve come to know is June Almeida, the Scottish virologist who was the first to capture images of human coronaviruses, as well as the rubella virus.

Born June Dalziel Hart in Glasgow, Scotland in 1930, her mother Jane Dalziel Steven was a shop assistant and her father Harry Leonard Hart was a bus driver. The family, firstly consisting of June, her parents, and her younger brother lived in a tenement in a working-class neighborhood. Unfortunately, June’s younger brother passed away at the age of six in 1940, due to diphtheria. The experience likely sparked June’s interest in biological science.

June proved to be a good student, even winning a school wide prize in science, but her family was unable to afford university. Because of this June completed her education at 16 and went to work as a laboratory technician in histopathology at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. In her teens June also developed a lifelong interest in photography that would eventually prove useful in her career as a scientist.

photo via what is biotechnology?

At the age of 22, June accepted a similar job working in the historic St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and she moved to the city with her parents. In London she made the acquaintance of Enrique Rosalio “Henry” Almeida, a Venezuelan artist. The two shared a love of classical music and playing the recorder, and the couple got married after two years.

The couple made the decision to move to Canada where June Almeida began working on electron microscopy imaging at the Ontario Cancer Institute. It was here, working as a technician, that she learned a technique called “negative staining,” using heavy metal to heighten the contrast of images, that she would later use to detect the coronavirus. With less emphasis on formal degrees in Canada, Almeida’s career was able to progress further as her skill became apparent and she began to be included in scientific publications about the influence of viruses on cancer.

Earning a promotion to junior scientist and then research associate, Almeida began to publish as a lead author and to pursue her own research on the viruses that cause chickenpox, rabies, and common warts. In many cases, Almeida’s research was the first to bring to light the structure of these viruses and she even published a paper outlining a structure-based classification system.

The Almeida’s decided to move back to London and Anthony Waterson, recently appointed the chair of microbiology at St. Thomas’s Hospital (where Boris Johnson happened to be treated for COVID-19 just a few months ago), invited June Almeida to work with him as an electron microscopist researching cold viruses and the hepatitis B virus. At St. Thomas’s however June had trouble going through the administrative process to get access to the electron microscope. A “forceful personality” Almeida simply used the electron microscope when no one who would object was around. Eventually she got her own microscope. 

photo via what is biotechnology?

June and Henry divorced in the late 60s and based on the value of June’s publications she was awarded a doctorate. Almeida and Waterson began collaborating with a scientist named David Tyrrell, who was examining nasal swabs. He was looking for an alternative to infecting human volunteers in order to detect viruses and in his words, “[June] seemed to be extending the range of the electron microscope to new limits.”

Tyrrell sent over various samples and Almeida identified some as influenza and herpes viruses. Another virus, taken from a nasal swabbing of a boarding school student, was unidentified—labeled B814. It resembled images Almeida had captured of viruses found in chickens with bronchitis and mice with hepatitis, but not something before seen in humans. Dorothy Hamre, a scientist from University of Chicago sent over samples with similar properties and Almeida confirmed that these and B814 were in fact the same type of virus she’d identified in animals.

Almeida and her team agreed on the name “coronavirus” since the virus’ halo resembled the halos of stellar coronas. The paper was initially rejected because peer-reviewers thought the coronaviruses were just badly imaged influenza viruses but the team found a journal to publish the paper and virologists came to agree that these were a distinct discovery. Almeida produced the first images of the rubella virus the same year.

Photo: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

By the early 80s, most textbooks and articles on virology used images produced by June Almeida. She married a fellow virologist named Phillip Gardner and they both retired, moving to Bexhill, England where they ran a small antique business. June learned to do antique restoration and taught yoga, but couldn’t resist the call of the lab, returning in an advisory role to St. Thomas’s Hospital one day a week. 

Her and her colleagues at St. Thomas’s published some of the first images of HIV and one of her students went on to make the first identification of a norovirus. Almeida threw herself into digital photography and learning the flute in addition to continuing lab work until her death in 2007.

 The importance of June Almeida’s coronavirus discovery began to be more fully recognized after the deadly 2002 SARS outbreak. While it doesn’t make the current pandemic any less frustrating or tragic, it’s inspiring how Almeida’s passion and skill (“green fingers for microscopy” according to her colleagues) has enabled so much progress. And while we might not have her suite of skills, the personal qualities noted by her friends and fellow scientists, as well as her daughter specifically, were things available to everyone: “Patience and persistence in spades,” and “valuing individuals in their own right.”