In March 1961, Dr. Anthony Epstein, a pathologist at London’s Middlesex Hospital, nearly missed a visiting physician’s afternoon lecture on children in Uganda with unusually large facial tumors.
Dr. Dennis Burkett, a native physician of Ireland, who calls himself a bush surgeon, has shown slides of bulbous copper that grow along mountains and are located in tropical African regions where rainfall is abundant. During his lecture, Dr. Birkett mapped a veritable childhood cancer belt that extended across equatorial Africa.
Despite Dr. Epstein’s initial reluctance to attend the conversation—he sat in the back to make a quick escape—Dr. Burkett’s talk grew in his enthusiasm. When the lecture was over, he knew he would abandon all his ongoing projects to find the cause of the unusual disorder. His doctoral student, Yvonne Barr, soon joined him and, by 1964, their groundbreaking research revealed the first virus capable of causing cancer in humans.
This announcement rocked the scientific world. Some physicians and scientists applauded the discovery; Others refused to accept it.
Dr. Epstein died on February 6 at his home in London. He was 102 years old. His death was confirmed by the University of Bristol, where Dr. Epstein was professor of pathology from 1968 to 1985, and head of the department for 15 years.
The pathogen that has come to bear his and Dr. Barr’s names—the Epstein-Barr virus—belongs to the herpes family and is one of the most common on the planet. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s adult population carries the virus, also known as EBV
“To have the insight and to be able to act on his hypothesis, with little known seriousness, and to identify novel viruses was a breakthrough,” said Dr. Daryl Hill, of the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Bristol in England. The chief said. in an email.
Studies since Dr. Epstein’s discovery have linked EBV, which is spread through close human contact, to several medical conditions, including multiple sclerosis and chronic Covid. As with other members of the herpes family, once infected with EBV, you are infected for life.
“Most people never know they’re infected,” Jeffrey Cohen, chief of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the New York Times in 2022.
EBV causes mononucleosis, also known as the kissing disease, which primarily affects adolescents and young adults with fever and swollen lymph nodes. EBV is also associated with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and common nose and throat cancers in China.
A tumor that affects children in Africa, known as Burkitt’s lymphoma, has also been diagnosed in other tropical regions, such as Brazil and New Guinea. Medical scientists theorize that EBV causes lymphoma in children in tropical regions because children in such regions often have weakened immune systems from exposure to malaria parasites. The World Health Organization estimates that there are three to six cases of Burkitt’s lymphoma in 100,000 children per year, including in obese areas.
When the 50th anniversary of the discovery of EBV was celebrated in 2014, Dr. Epstein told a BBC interviewer what he was thinking when he heard Dr. Birkett speak.
“I thought there must be a biological agent involved,” Dr. Epstein said. “I was working on chicken viruses that cause cancer. I had virus-producing tumors on the front of my head.
The chicken virus he was referring to was the Rous sarcoma virus, which was the first cancer-causing virus discovered by Dr. Francis Peyton Rous, a pathologist at the Rockefeller University in New York in 1911. Dr. Russ received the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Even a noble doctor survived. Epstein and Barr, their discovery has had a lasting impact on science and medicine.
“We now know many viruses and bacteria species that cause certain types of cancer,” said Dr. Hill. “However, one could argue that the discovery of the Epstein-Barr virus paved the way for the prevention of some cancers through vaccination.”
Vaccines are available against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes cervical and other forms of cancer. Hepatitis B vaccine helps prevent liver cancer. But there is no vaccine against Epstein-Barr, although two candidate vaccines are in early stage clinical research.
The discovery of EBV was not quick. Dr. Birkett sent biopsies of the tumor from Kampala, Uganda, to London, but Dr. Epstein could not detect the virus in the initial samples, according to Dr. Hill, who wrote Dr. Epstein’s memoir for the University of Bristol.
When another biopsy shipment was diverted from Heathrow Airport to another airport in Manchester, England, due to fog, the sample appeared to be ruined, Dr. Hill said.
“By the time the sample reached Tony, it was cloudy – usually a sign of bacterial contamination that would send it to the bin. Tony didn’t throw it away but examined it carefully,” Dr. Hill wrote in his tribute.
“He discovered, to his surprise, that the cloudiness was caused by lymphoid tumor cells that had removed the biopsy in transit and were now floating happily in suspension.” He continued, “Tony took this opportunity to try to grow cell lines in culture. He showed that they survive the unknown.
By studying his new specimen with a powerful electron microscope, Dr. Epstein was able to detect the distinct viral signature of a herpes virus. Dr. Hale called the discovery a “eureka moment.”
Drs Epstein, Barr and Bert Achong, who prepared the electron microscopy specimens, announced the discovery in a scientific paper published in the March 1964 issue of the scientific journal The Lancet.
Dr. Barr died in 2016 at the age of 83.
Michael Anthony Epstein was born on May 18, 1921 in London and was educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He was a graduate of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
After leaving the University of Bristol in 1985, Dr. Epstein became a Fellow of Wolfson College and remained at the institution until his retirement in 2001. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991.
His marriage to Lisbeth Knight ended in divorce in the 1960s. Survivors include his longtime companion Dr. Catherine Ward, a virologist, two sons from his marriage, Michael and Simon Epstein, and a daughter, Susan Holmes.
He told the BBC in 2014 that one of his most ardent wishes was to develop a vaccine against EBV, a wish that could come true in the not-too-distant future if current research prevails.