June Almeida
National Women’s History Museum
June Almeida serves as a role model for determination and innovation. As the person to
identify the first human coronavirus, scientists, and people all over the world, are indebted
to her work.
June Dalziel Hart was born on October 5, 1930 in Glasglow, Scotland. Her father, Henry
Leonard Hart, drove a bus and her mother, Jane (Steven) Danziel worked at a local shop.
Growing up in a tenement in Alexandra Park in northeast Glasglow, Almeida excelled in
school, but money was always tight. In 1947, she won the top science prize at her school
and wanted to continue pursuing a career in science after her high school graduation.
However, there was no money to pay for her college tuition, so Almeida took a job to help
her parents pay the bills. She started at age 16 as a lab technician in histopathology
(studying and diagnosing tissue disease) at the Glasglow Royal Infirmary. Shortly
thereafter, the family moved to London and Almeida took up the same job at St.
Batholomew’s Hospital in the city. She worked diligently at her job, but—without a
college degree—it was hard to advance.
In 1954, Almeida married Enriques (or Henry) Rosalio Almeida, a Venezuelan artist; the
marriage ended in divorce. The two had one daughter, Joyce, and moved to Canada. While
in Canada, Almeida found more opportunities than in London for someone without a
college degree, and it was in Canada where her career took off. She took a job as an
electron microscopy technician—meaning she used a powerful electron microscope to take
photos of specimens for research and diagnosis—at the Ontario Cancer Institute (now the
Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) in Toronto. As she made images with her microscope,
she acquired the reputation for being an expert in the process. In the 1960s, detecting
viruses was painstaking and slow work. Examining a single cell could take hours, and
images were grainy and hard to see. Despite this context, Almeida was able to make these
images clearly and quickly. She perfected a technique called negative staining, which
helped her find and identify viruses.
After working for years in Canada, Professor A.P. Waterson, a virologist, persuaded
Almeida to go back to London in 1964. She started at St. Thomas’ Hospital and then
moved with Professor Waterson to the Royal Post Graduate Medical School in 1967. It
was during this time that her career began to blossom; she co-authored many scientific
publications and continued identifying and imaging many viruses. In her career, she
became the first to visualize the rubella virus and she provided invaluable research on HIV
and Hepatitis B, of which she helped identify the structure. She also perfected a technique
called immune electron microscopy (a process that makes identifying viruses easier) and
taught many other virologists her techniques.
It was while she was working in London that she came to the attention of Dr. David Tyrell.
Dr. Tyrell was a researcher working on the common cold, but he had one sample (B814)
that he could not identify. Hearing of Almeida’s expertise, he sent her the sample to
identify. Using her negative-staining technique, she created a sharp, clear picture of the
mysterious virus. Not only was she able to clearly see it, but the virus looked familiar to
one she had seen years before. But scientists had rejected her earlier identification, saying
that what Almeida identified as a different virus was in fact a blurry image of a flu virus.
But Almeida was proved right in the end—that “blurry photo” and Tyrell’s B814 virus
were the first identified human coronaviruses. She and others called it a “coronavirus”
because each piece of virus looked like a crown, which in Latin is corona.
Almeida continued to write scientific papers and conduct research on viruses. Due to her
contributions, the University of London awarded her a master’s degree in 1970 and a
Doctor of Science in 1971—she finally had the college degrees she had wanted since high
school. Most virology review articles and textbooks contain images of viruses she
produced.
Almeida finished her career at the Wellcome Research Laboratories in London where she
worked on vaccines and diagnostics. In 1985, she retired and moved to Bexhill (a town in
southeast England) with her second husband, Philip Gardner, who was also a virologist. In
retirement, Almeida taught yoga, traded antiques, and restored China with Gardner until
his death in 1994. Almeida could not stay away from her microscope for long though, and
in the late 1980s she returned to St. Thomas’ as an advisor and applied her expertise to
produce some of the first high-quality photos of HIV.
June Almeida died on December 1, 2007, in Bexhill at the age of 77. When a new,
unidentified virus first appeared in China in 2019, researchers used Almeida’s pioneering
work and techniques to identify it as another coronavirus. While her discovery may have
been overlooked during her lifetime, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought the world’s
attention to Almeida’s important work. Without it, things may still be blurry today.
Citation:
Rothberg, Emma. “June Almeida.” National Women's History Museum,
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/june-almeida.