The Virus Queen

My An Arkie's Faith column from the December 16, 2020, issue of The Polk County Pulse.

One of my favorite activities is listening to podcasts. I listen whenever I am driving or have free time. I like those that deal with history and science. Surprisingly Brilliant is a new podcast that started this year. It is a science history podcast that tells the stories of surprising yet brilliant discoveries, ideas, and people. A recent episode told a story that I want to share with you.

In 1930, a girl named June Hart was born in the slums of Glasgow, Scotland. She was very bright and overly motivated, but she had to leave school at 16 and get a job to help her family. She managed to get an apprenticeship to become a lab technician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Her salary was 25 shillings a week, which would be $160.00 in today’s money. Her job was to look at tissue samples through a microscope. She was exceptionally good at her job, becoming a microscopy expert as a young woman.

When she was 24 years old, she married Enriques Almeida. Not long after her marriage, the couple moved to Canada. The Ontario Cancer Institute hired her as a technician and a research assistant in electron microscopy. Anything smaller than light waves cannot be seen in a regular microscope, no matter how high the magnification. The new electron technology allowed researchers to see things even tinier than the waves of light. When June arrived at the Institute, she had never worked with an electron microscope.

June soon became involved in significant research that established the link between viruses and cancer. It was her imaging using the electron microscope that helped establish that relationship. Another thing that was important about her work in Canada was that she devised a classification system to group viruses through her electron microscope images.

When researchers explored the common cold, they discovered that many different viruses caused it. In 1967, researchers at the Common Cold Research Unit came across some virus strains they had not seen before. They grew in tissue culture in a weird way that the researchers did not recognize. So, they sent some samples to June. When she looked at it under an electron microscope, she saw a little ball with some spikes on it.

June and her colleagues are the ones who named it coronavirus because the things sticking off it look like a halo or a crown, and corona means crown in Latin. At the time, they were excited to have discovered and named a new kind of virus. They found that several different types of coronavirus can cause the common cold. 

June took the first images of coronavirus, showing that it causes cold-like symptoms. But when she submitted a paper on her findings, the journal rejected it. They said, “Oh, these are just very bad electron microscope pictures of something like the influenza virus.” But June and her colleagues persisted. They took better electron microscope photos and were able to get their work published. Eventually, the scientific community accepted their research. 

At the time, coronaviruses were not considered important. But in 2003, when there was the SARS outbreak, researchers studied June Almeida’s original work. SARS is a sudden acute respiratory syndrome caused by a coronavirus. It is a different virus than the one causing the COVID-19 pandemic today, but they are both coronaviruses. When the SARS outbreak happened, that’s when researchers reexamined June Almeida’s work and how her images contributed to the understanding of coronaviruses. Her groundbreaking work has been indispensable in the fight against COVID-19.

So how did June go from a humble girl in Glasgow who could not afford to go to school to becoming recognized as a master of electron microscopy? This uneducated girl laid the foundations for classifying viruses. She provided evidence for the link between viruses and cancer, gave us images of rubella, hepatitis B, HIV, and the first images of human coronavirus.

One biographer said that this was just a confluence of chance moments. She happens to get a job in a lab even though she is 16 and uneducated. Her husband happens to want to move to Canada because he does not like London. The electron microscopy position happens to be the only one open for any microscopist when June arrives at the Ontario Cancer Institute. Researchers happen to send her a sample of coronavirus. All these chance moments end up changing the entire course of her life and her career. 

Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.” When June got her first job at 16, spending hours looking through a microscope for low wages, I am sure that she had no idea that she would one day be the virus queen. It may have been the right place at the right time, but she made the most of it. The dots can all be there, but you must be able to put them together.

Gentle Reader, time is a remarkable gift from God. He wants us to use our time to take the opportunities that he has for us. Sometimes we are looking for the big break that will make us successful. But the Bible says that “if a person waits for perfect weather, he will never plant his seeds. And if he is afraid that every cloud will bring rain, he will never harvest his crops.” Ecclesiastes 11:4 (ICB) Remember to make the most of the opportunity that God gives you today. Do not wait until just the right moment comes along because that moment may never come. “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity. Ephesians 5:15,16 (NIV)