April 18, 2020 Comments Off on #GreatScientist: June Almeida, discoverer of first coronavirus Views: 516 Looking Back, Nostalgia

News outlets worldwide have shared in recent days the story of June Almeida, the woman who discovered the first human coronavirus back in the 1960s.

According to the BBC, June Almeida went on to become a pioneer of virus imaging. She was the daughter of a Scottish bus driver, who left school at 16. Although she left school early, Ms. Almeida found employment as a lab technician in histopathology at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

The virologist was born June Hart in 1930, and grew up just north east of Glasgow, Scotland. At a later point in her life, she moved to London to advance her career and in 1954 married Venezuelan artist, Enriques Almeida.

Scottish virologist June Almeida

“The couple and their young daughter moved to Toronto in Canada and, according to medical writer George Winter, it was at the Ontario Cancer Institute that Dr Almeida developed her outstanding skills with an electron microscope. She pioneered a method which better visualised viruses by using antibodies to aggregate them,” reports the BBC.

“Mr Winter told Drivetime on BBC Radio Scotland her talents were recognised in the UK and she was lured back in 1964 to work at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London, the same hospital that treated Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he was suffering from the Covid-19 virus. On her return, she began to collaborate with Dr David Tyrrell, who was running research at the common cold unit in Salisbury in Wiltshire.

“Mr Winter says Dr Tyrrell had been studying nasal washings from volunteers and his team had found that they were able to grow quite a few common cold-associated viruses but not all of them. One sample in particular, which became known as B814, was from the nasal washings of a pupil at a boarding school in Surrey in 1960. They found that they were able to transmit common cold symptoms to volunteers but they were unable to grow it in routine cell culture,” writes the BBC.

The National Geographic also reported on the story: “When June Almeida peered into her electron microscope in 1964, she saw a round, grey dot covered in tiny spokes. She and her colleagues noted that the pegs formed a halo around the virus–much like the sun’s corona. What she saw would become known as the coronavirus, and Almeida played a pivotal role in identifying it. That feat was all the more remarkable because the 34-year-old scientist never completed her formal education.”

Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that have a halo, or crown-like (corona) appearance when viewed under an electron microscope.

During her lifetime, Dr. Almeida’s work had not been much recognized, however. A paper she had submitted to a peer-reviewed journal was rejected because the referees believed the images she had produced during the course of her research were nothing more than bad pictures of flu virus particles.

“The new discovery from strain B814 was written up in the British Medical Journal in 1965 and the first photographs of what she had seen were published in the Journal of General Virology two years later,” reports the BBC.

Aside from being the discoverer of the first human coronavirus, Dr. Almeida is also one of the several scientists who gave the name to the coronavirus, due to the crown or halo surrounding it on the viral image.

Dr. Almeida eventually obtained a doctorate during her lifetime by working at the Postgraduate Medical School in London. She would conclude her career at the Wellcome Institute, where she developed several patents for imaging viruses. During the 1980s, now in the role of advisor, Dr. Almeida helped publish some of the first high-quality images of the HIV virus amid the HIV epidemic. June Almeida died at the age of 77, in 2007.

As the BBC notes, “Now 13 years after her death she is finally getting recognition she deserves as a pioneer whose work speeded up the understanding of the virus that is currently spreading throughout the world.”

Coronaviruses resemble a large family of viruses that are known to cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe conditions such as the Middle Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Neither of these two prompted the world to enforce lockdowns during outbreaks in previous years, as has the novel coronavirus that causes the infectious disease, COVID-19. Bats are known carriers of coronavirus concentrations.

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Featured photo: On the left, an image of Dr. June Almeida, on the right, a photo of respiratory viruses that grow in organ culture, which Dr. Almeida researched greatly.

Tags: Great Scientists, June Almeida, Looking Back, Scottish virologist, The United Kingdom, Virus Discoverer