BIOMEDICAL 30 THE SCIENTIST
SCIENCE History
JUNE ALMEIDA VIRUS IMAGING PIONEER
Beginning her career as a junior hospital technician, Dr June Almeida completed it as a world-renowned virologist whose techniques revolutionised diagnostic electron microscopy. She was also the first person to see a human coronavirus. Here we look back over her life.
J
une Dalziel Hart was born on 5 October 1930, in a secondfloor tenement flat at 10 Duntroon Street, Glasgow, her mother a shop assistant and her father a bus driver (her younger brother Harry died from diphtheria aged six years in 1940). Flourishing academically at Whitehill Senior Secondary School, Dennistoun, where she won a school prize in science, financial constraints meant that June could not go to university.
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So, having passed her “higher” examinations, she left school in 1947 to become a junior histopathology technician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, earning 25 shillings per week.
Early days In 1952 the Harts moved to London, where June joined the pathology department of St Bartholomew’s Hospital as research assistant to Professor John WS Blacklock (1896–1973) and became an Associate of the Institute of Medical Laboratory
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