June Almeida

The virologist June Hart, who is known as June Almeida. June Almeida was born in a humble tenement for the poor in the city of Glasgow, Scotland, and her parents were struggling with poverty, as her father worked as a simple bus driver.
When June Almeida was 12 years old, her younger brother suffered from the suffocating disease diphtheria and died. This was not a passing event; rather, it had a major impact on June Almeida and inspired her to become interested in science and medicine. Although during that era, medicines and vaccines had proliferated, they were only for soldiers and not for the poor. June felt angry because, despite the spread of science, they had not managed to make the invisible visible, and this was June Almeida's dream—to make the invisible visible.
June was an outstanding student who dreamed of attending university, but due to the financial circumstances suffered by June’s family, she was forced to leave school at the age of 16 to help her family financially, yet June never lost her passion and her dream.
In 1947, at the age of 17, June got a job at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary as a laboratory technician, starting in histopathology (tissue science). Although she did not hold a university degree, she took a step toward achieving her dream. Even though there was no textbook for her to study, this laboratory was the key; June spent her time slicing human tissue samples, coloring them with chemical dyes, and meticulously preparing them for microscopic examination.
In 1952, June made a decision to move to London to realize her ambition. Although she outperformed everyone in the laboratory, the rigid academic system refused to promote her or grant her a status because she did not hold a university degree. In London, she joined St. Bartholomew's Hospital to achieve her goal and develop her expertise in a larger city.
June used to spend long hours preparing and slicing microscopic samples with great precision, yet the treatment she received from doctors and scientists was that she was just a replacement lab technician. They were strict with her to the point that they refused to listen to her or include her in any research simply because she was a girl and did not even hold a degree.
But in 1954, June married the Venezuelan artist Enrique Almeida and emigrated with him to the city of Toronto in Canada in search of a better environment. June Hart began to take off from the Ontario Cancer Institute; in this Canadian institute, the degree was not an obstacle to her professional advancement. Instead, her competence was appreciated, and she was appointed by the administration to manage and develop electron microscopy research—a highly complex device that relies on electron beams instead of light to see microscopic objects.
However, this new job placed her directly in the face of a highly complex physical and optical dilemma; she spent long hours examining virus-infected samples, but it was very difficult to see or detect them clearly. The primary reason for not seeing the very small viruses was that they appeared scattered and mixed up under the microscope, and there was a great similarity between the shape of the viruses and cellular debris, making it difficult to distinguish between them. This difficulty caused June not to run experiments for years until she found a method to separate the viruses from the impurities.
By 1963, June Almeida succeeded in pioneering the technique of Immune Electron Microscopy (IEM). She brought the scattered viruses together by adding antibodies into the sample, where these antibodies acted like a precise magnet that hunted the viruses, causing them to clump and gather together in specific groups. Thanks to this clumping, the viruses became very distinct on the screen and much clearer than the surrounding impurities and cellular debris.
This great scientific success made June Almeida’s name famous among top scientists in the world. As a result, she was summoned to return to London in 1964 to work at the prestigious St. Thomas' Hospital Medical School, at the request of Professor David Tyrrell, who was leading research into the common cold. Tyrrell sent her mysterious samples taken from a cold strain that all British laboratories had failed to see or identify.
June utilized her innovative technique and noticed that the virus sample was distinct and resembled a crown. Based on this distinctive circular shape, she named it the Coronavirus (the crown-like virus), but this discovery faced rejection because they believed that the sample was merely a distorted version of the regular influenza virus, rather than a new type of virus.
The discovery was not officially and globally recognized until 1968, after the research was published in the British Medical Journal, and the name "Coronavirus" was officially adopted based on her precise description. She retired in 1985, dedicating her time to teaching, yoga, and antiquities trading, but she remained a reference whom scientists consulted until her death in 2007 at the age of 77.
In this era, specifically in the year 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, June Almeida's name returned as the scientific community realized that her innovative 1963 technique was the primary reason that allowed the identification and fight against the virus.
From a girl who left school at a young age, to a woman who gave humanity the visual weapon to defeat pandemics.