June Almeida

June Almeida was the Glasgow scientist who first showed the world what a coronavirus looks like. The daughter of a city bus driver, she left school at sixteen with no money for university, took a job at a laboratory bench, and rose by sheer talent to become one of the greatest virus-imagers of the twentieth century. Peering down an electron microscope, she captured the first clear picture of a human coronavirus — a grey sphere ringed with tiny spikes — and helped give the whole family of viruses its name. More than fifty years later, when a new coronavirus swept the world, it was recognised using the science she had pioneered.

This page tells her story: her East End childhood, the laboratory bench that replaced a university, her years in Canada, her great imaging technique, the discovery of the coronavirus, and the recognition that came only late.

A bus driver’s daughter

June Dalziel Hart was born on 5 October 1930 in a tenement in the East End of Glasgow, at Duntroon Street in Dennistoun, the daughter of a bus driver. Hers was a hard-up, working-class home, and it was touched early by tragedy when her younger brother died of diphtheria — a loss that may well have kindled her lifelong interest in disease. A gifted pupil, she nonetheless left school at sixteen, for the plain reason that there was no money to send her to university. It was a beginning that gave no hint of the international scientist she would become.

The bench, not the lecture hall

Instead of a lecture hall, June Hart went to a laboratory bench. She took a job as a technician in the histopathology department of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, learning to examine diseased tissue under the microscope and to recognise what she saw. It was here that she discovered both her aptitude and her passion for microscopy. She never took an undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow or anywhere else; everything she achieved, she achieved through skill, observation and relentless self-teaching — a reminder that great science does not always follow the expected path.

Canada & the microscope

In London she met and married the Venezuelan artist Enriques Almeida, and in 1954 the couple emigrated to Canada, where June took a post as an electron microscopy technician at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. There her real gifts flowered. She proved extraordinarily skilled at coaxing clear images of tiny structures from the electron microscope, and her name began to appear on scientific papers identifying the shapes of viruses. So respected did her work become that she was awarded a Doctor of Science degree on the strength of her published research alone — a rare distinction for someone who had never taken a first degree.

Immune electron microscopy

Almeida’s great contribution was a technique known as immune electron microscopy. The problem she solved was a stubborn one: in a messy tissue sample, the few virus particles were almost impossible to pick out among the cellular debris. Her insight was to add antibodies taken from infected patients, which would swarm around the virus and clump the particles together, making them suddenly visible and identifiable. It was elegant, powerful and widely useful, and it turned electron microscopy into a practical tool for diagnosing viral disease. In 1964 her growing reputation brought her back to London, to St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School.

The crown

It was at St Thomas’s, in 1966, that she made the discovery for which she is now famous. Researchers studying the common cold had a sample — known as B814, taken from a schoolboy — that they simply could not grow or identify. It was sent to Almeida. Down the microscope she saw a round, grey particle fringed with a halo of tiny spikes, like a crown or the sun’s corona. She had, in fact, seen such particles before, but a scientific journal had once rejected her images as merely poor pictures of influenza. This time the finding stood, and the new family of viruses was named ‘coronavirus’, after the crown she had seen.

Seeing the unseen

The coronavirus was only one of June Almeida’s achievements. She was the first person ever to capture an image of the rubella virus, the cause of German measles; she worked out the structure of the hepatitis B virus; and years later, coaxed out of semi-retirement, she produced some of the first high-quality images of HIV. She trained a generation of virologists in her methods, one of whom went on to discover the norovirus. Her finely detailed electron micrographs were so good that they were reproduced in textbook after textbook for decades, long after she had made them.

Recognition at last

Almeida retired to the south coast of England, where she taught yoga and dealt in antiques, and she died in 2007, her name known only to specialists. Then, in 2020, a new coronavirus swept the globe — and the world remembered the Glaswegian who had first seen and named its kind. Scientists identified the new virus using the very techniques she had pioneered, and her spiked grey sphere became one of the most recognised images on earth. June Almeida is now honoured at last as one of the outstanding scientists Glasgow has ever produced.

At a glance