June Almeida

June Dalziel Almeida (5 October 1930 – 1 December 2007) was a Scottish virologist, a pioneer in virus imaging and identification.

Her skills in electron microscopy earned her an international reputation.

Almeida was born on 5 October 1930 at 10 Duntroon Street, Glasgow, to Jane Dalziel (née Steven) and Harry Leonard Hart, a bus driver.

In 1940, her six-year-old brother died of diphtheria, perhaps leading to her interest in diseases.

In 1947, when she was 16, Almeida attended Whitehill Secondary School where she excelled academically winning the science prize.

In 1947, when she was 16, she left school but was unable to attend university at that time due to financial constraints.

She instead took up a position as a histopathology technician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

She was then recruited by a former colleague, Dr John W.S. Blacklock to do similar work at St Bartholomew's Hospital.

She worked at St Bartholomew's until 1954.

She married Enriques Rosalio (Henry) Almeida in 1954.

In 1954, Almeida was hired for a newly opened position as electron microscopy technician at the Ontario Cancer Institute, where she worked for ten years.

While working as an electron microscopist, she and her Cancer Institute colleagues produced a series of studies applying negative staining to clinical problems.

In 1963, Almeida was the first of three authors of an article in the journal Science, in which they identified virus-like particles in cancer patients' blood.

In the same year, she published her research in which she "negatively stained aggregates of antigen...and antibody" with the electron microscope.

Almeida's sense of humour arose in an ode to electron microscopy, and the symmetrical structure of coronavirus (with an apology to poet, William Blake).

“Virus, virus shining bright,

In the phosphotungstic night,

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fivefold symmetry.”

In 1964, Almeida was recruited by St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in London.

In 1964, Tony Waterson, who had just been appointed as chair of microbiology at St Thomas's, met Almeida while visiting Toronto, and recruited her to join his research team at one of the oldest and most prestigious medical schools in the United Kingdom—London's St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, now part of King's College London.

At St Thomas's, she worked on hepatitis B virus and the cold viruses.

Almeida succeeded in identifying viruses that were previously unknown, including—in 1966—a group of viruses that was later named coronavirus, due to their crown-like appearance.

Her immune electron microscopy (IEM) innovations and insights contributed to research related to the diagnosis of hepatitis B, HIV, and rubella, among other viral diseases.

Her electron micrographs continue to be included in virology review textbooks, decades after she produced them.

In 1966, Waterson and Almeida collaborated with the physician and director of research on the common cold, David Tyrrell, who was working on a new organ culture system.

Tyrrell's team had been attempting to detect the presence of rhinoviruses in tissue cultures of cells that they had produced in the lab.

They wanted to detect a specific respiratory virus they called B814.

The Swedish professor Bertil Hoorn could make all Tyrrell's respiratory viruses in organ cultures of cells from the human airway in the laboratory, except for virus B814.

This organ culture system meant they did not have to depend on human volunteers to do research on these viruses.

They wanted a reliable method to detect virus B814.

By 1967, she had earned her Doctor of Science on the basis of her research and the resulting publications, while working in Canada, at Toronto's Ontario Cancer Institute and then in London at St Thomas's. she then continued her research at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (RPGMS), which later became part of the Imperial College School of Medicine.

By 1967, Almeida earned her Doctor of Science (DSc) based on her publications on electron micrographic research of antibodies conducted at the Ontario Cancer Institute and at St Thomas's.

In the book Cold Wars (2002), which Tyrrell wrote with Michael Fielder, he described how when he first met Almeida she seemed to be extending the range of the electron microscope to new limits.

According to Tyrrell, prior to her innovative work, it was generally accepted that viruses had to be concentrated and purified to detect them with the electron microscope.

When she told Tyrrell that she could "find virus particles" in the organ cultures that they had collected, with her "new, improved techniques", he was skeptical.

Tyrrell's team sent samples to Almeida in London.

These included a sample prepared with the B814 virus, along with samples infected with influenza and herpes, which were well-known.

When she examined the samples through her microscope grids, "she recognized all the known viruses, and her pictures revealed their structure beautifully. But more importantly, she also saw virus particles in the B814 sample."

she told Tyrrell that the B814 specimens had reminded her of particles she had previously studied in a "disease called infectious bronchitis of chickens" and in another disease—"mouse hepatitis liver inflammation."