Critical Focus | Forgotten Women Who Lit the Way
THE MICROSCOPE
2020, Volume 68:3/4, pp. 139– 150
DOI
https://doi.org/10.59082/NNCU1575
AUTHOR
Brian J. Ford
EXCERPT
Curiously, I was one of the first people ever to see a coronavirus. It was only because of a brilliant young woman that anybody saw it at all. She had been a promising science pupil at school in Glasgow, but her father was a bus driver and nobody they knew had ever gone to university. So in 1947, the young June Hart left school at 16 and trained as a histopathology technician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, routinely preparing hematoxylin and eosin-stained sections for oil-immersion microscopy. She married a Venezuelan artist named Enrique Rosalio Almeida and moved to London, and from there they went to Canada, where she became the first electron microscopist at the Ontario Cancer Institute. She had no formal academic qualifications yet was awarded a Sc.D. degree on the basis of her remarkable publications. She was later recruited to work on viruses by St. Thomas’s Medical School in London — the same hospital that was to treat Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he contracted Covid-19 in April 2020.