June Almeida: Visualising Viruses
June was born in Glasgow in 1930. 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. 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.
June Almeida died on December 1, 2007, 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.
