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At a time when scientists from around the world are working on the Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, the work of a pioneering Scottish virologist is back in the spotlight. In 1964 June Almeida He was responsible for identifying the first human coronavirus in his laboratory at St. Thomas Hospital in London.
His story is recounted in the Oxford National Biographies Dictionary. June was born in 1930 in Glasgowat Scotland. At age 16, in 1947, he dropped out of school and, not having the resources to go to university, he began working as a laboratory technician in histopathology at the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. He then moved to London, working in the same sector as St. Bartholomew Hospital. In 1954, she married the Venezuelan artist Enrique Almeida and later moved to the Canada, where he began to work as a technician in electron microscopy in Ontario Cancer Institute.
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There her skills soon became evident and, despite not having an academic background, June began to subscribe to a series of scientific publications, mainly related to the structure of viruses that until then could not be visualized. On a visit to Toronto, professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the St. Thomas Hospital, the same hospital that treated Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he had Covid-19, convinces her to return to London in 1964.
At that time, his publications had already been recognized and awarded a DSc, a “Doctor of Science” diploma awarded to authors of scientific articles of exceptional standards. But it is from his return to the United Kingdom that his career takes off.
The scientist begins to collaborate with the researcher. David Tyrrell, who analyzed patients from the hospital’s common influenza unit. Some samples of voluntary nasal washings were sent to June, which can identify, under their microscope, the common cold viruses, which could not be conventionally grown in the laboratory, and the new viruses not yet known, including the coronavirus family, a new cause of respiratory infections.
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The medical writer George Winter I said to BBC In Scotland, in June, the coronavirus was described as a flu-like virus, responsible for the flu, but not exactly the same. The scientist says that she had seen those particles before, while investigating hepatitis in rats and infectious bronchitis In chickens, however, the article was rejected, as the reviewers considered that it had only produced “bad images” of virus particles. flu. According to Winter, it was June and Tyrrell who baptized the coronavirus, depending on the corona or halo that surrounds the particle in the image.
The pioneering technique used in June, negative contrast immunoelectronmicroscopy, had simplicity and originality that characterized his work. Other notable achievements of the scientist were the first visualization of the rubella and the discovery of the existence of two different components in the Hepatitis B, one on the surface of the particle and one internally. It is the antibodies against the surface component that protect against infection and are stimulated by current vaccines.
June’s technique also allowed scientists to visualize, for the first time, the Hepatitis A. Currently, most virology review articles and books contain electron micrographs of viruses produced by virology.
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The virologist ended her career at the Wellcome Research Laboratory, where she worked on the development of diagnostic tests and vaccine development. She retired in 1985 and became a yoga teacher, but in the late 1980s, she returned to St. Thomas Hospital as a consultant, where she helped record images of HIV virus.
June Almeida He died in 2007, at the age of 77. Thirteen years after her death, she is recognized as a pioneer in the work that allows understanding of the virus that is spreading around the world today.
