June Almeida

For most of her life June Almeida was known, if at all, only to fellow virologists — and then, in 2020, the world went looking for the person who had first seen the thing that had shut it down, and found a self-taught Glaswegian who had left school at sixteen. Almeida was one of the great electron microscopists of the twentieth century, a pioneer of virus imaging whose techniques let scientists see and name viruses that had been invisible — and it was she who produced the first clear pictures of a human coronavirus, the halo-spiked sphere now stamped on the memory of a generation.

From the Tenement

She was born June Hart on 5 October 1930 and raised in a tenement in the north-east of Glasgow, the daughter of a bus driver; money was tight, and though she was a gifted pupil who won a place at secondary school, she left at sixteen because the family could not afford to keep her there. University was closed to her — and so she took the side door into science that Glasgow so often provided, starting as a laboratory technician in histopathology at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, learning the microscope by using it. It was an unpromising beginning for one of the most consequential scientific careers the city produced, and Almeida never disowned it; the lack of a degree shadowed her for years, and makes what she achieved the more remarkable.

The Woman Who Saw Viruses

In 1954 she married the Venezuelan artist Enriques Almeida and moved first to London and then, in 1964, to the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto, where her gift for the electron microscope flowered. Almeida developed a technique of real genius — immune electron microscopy — using antibodies from infected patients to make otherwise-invisible virus particles clump together, so that they could be found and photographed in a messy sample. It transformed the field: it allowed clinicians to diagnose infections by sight, and it let Almeida produce the first images of one virus after another. She was the first person ever to see the rubella virus; she showed that hepatitis B had two components; her methods were later used to identify norovirus and to study HIV. By her thirties her micrographs were appearing in the world’s leading journals, and she had earned, on the strength of her published work alone, a Doctor of Science.

The Coronavirus

The discovery for which she is now remembered came through a cold. Working back in London at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, Almeida was sent a sample — labelled B814, taken from the nose of a Surrey schoolboy — by Dr David Tyrrell of the Common Cold Unit, whose team could not grow or identify it by any standard method. Almeida’s microscope revealed round particles fringed with a halo of tiny spikes, resembling nothing then known in human disease but similar to viruses she had glimpsed in chickens and mice. Recognising a new family, she, Tyrrell and the virologist Tony Waterson named it after the crown-like halo: corona, the Latin for crown. The finding was published in the late 1960s. There is a sharp irony in the story, and a familiar one for a woman without a degree: Almeida had seen such particles even earlier, and had a paper rejected because the referees dismissed her images as merely bad photographs of the influenza virus.

Overlooked, Then Remembered

Almeida left research in the 1980s, trained briefly as a yoga teacher, and returned to virology only at the very end, advising on the first imaging of HIV. She died on 1 December 2007, her role in the coronavirus story largely forgotten outside her field. The pandemic of 2020 changed that: as the spiked sphere she had first captured filled every news bulletin, her name reappeared in the world’s press, and Glasgow rediscovered a daughter it had barely known it had — the tenement girl who left school at sixteen and taught the world to see its smallest enemies.

The Glasgow connection

Almeida’s Glasgow is the quiet one of a working childhood — the north-east tenements where she was raised, and above all the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in the shadow of the Cathedral, where a sixteen-year-old lab technician first bent over a microscope and began the self-education that led, by way of Toronto and London, to the first clear sight of a coronavirus.