Coronavirus / Who was June Almeida, the woman who discovered 1st human coronavirus?

New Delhi: When June Almeida, then aged around 34, first claimed to have spotted a new kind of virus in 1964, it was rejected by a peer-reviewed journal, the story goes.

The images she had captured, of a virus surrounded by what appeared to be a halo or a crown, were dismissed by the referees as “just bad pictures of influenza virus particles”. However, little did they know that the virus they were looking at would wreak havoc on the world just over 50 years down the line.

Almeida, a Scottish virologist, is credited with discovering the first human coronavirus — a family whose members include the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus at the centre of the current Covid-19 pandemic.

With the intensity of the Covid-19 onslaught stoking global curiosity around the coronavirus, the discovery made by Almeida, a pioneer of her field, is back in the limelight.

Scottish roots

Almeida was born June Hart on 5 October 1930 in Glasgow, where she grew up in one of the tenements — apartment blocks — that form a distinctive feature of the urban Scottish landscape.

Th daughter of a bus driver, Almeida had to leave school at the age of 16 despite being a stellar student because she could not afford higher education. She subsequently took up a job as a laboratory technician at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

She got married to a Venezuelan artist and the couple moved to Canada, where she began to work as an electron microscopy technician at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto.

According to a 2008 posthumous profile of Almeida, it was easier at the time to gain scientific recognition without a university degree in Canada than in Britain. Despite having no formal qualifications, she soon co-authored a number of scientific publications, mostly describing the structure of viruses that had not been visualised before. Almeida moved back to London in 1964 to work at St Thomas’ Hospital Medical School.