When June Almeida, then 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, reports The Print.
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.
Virologist June Almeida, who discovered the first human #coronavirus in 1964, grew up in north east Glasgow. https://t.co/xX0Zy6PIdb
— BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) April 15, 2020
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.
She pioneered a method which better visualised viruses by using antibodies to aggregate them, reports BBC.
Winter told Drivetime on BBC Radio Scotland her talents were recognized in the UK and she was lured back in 1964 to work at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in London, the same hospital that treated Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he was suffering from the Covid-19 virus.
Discovering the coronavirus
After returning to London, Almeida collaborated with Dr DAJ Tyrrell, a common cold researcher, who had been studying nasal washings, BBC reported. From these washings, Tyrrell’s team had found that they could grow some viruses associated with the common cold, but not all of them.
One such sample that could not be grown was taken from a boarding school student and known as B814, according to BBC.
Eventually Tyrrell and his team found that they could grow the virus in organ cultures and sent one to Almeida. She put the specimens under the microscope and saw particles which she described as being similar to influenza specimens, but not the same, BBC reported.
The specimen would become known as the first human coronavirus. The discovery was published in the British Medical Journal (now the BMJ) in 1965, BBC reported. The first photos of the coronavirus were published two years later in the Journal of General Virology.
