In March 1961, Dr. Anthony Epstein, a pathologist at Middlesex Hospital in London, almost skipped the visiting physician’s afternoon lecture about children with massive facial tumors in Uganda.
The physician, Dr. Denis Burkitt, a native of Ireland who called himself a bush surgeon, showed slides of bulbous tumors that appeared along the jawline and occurred in tropical regions of Africa where rainfall is high. During his interview, Dr. Burkitt mapped a veritable pediatric cancer belt extending across equatorial Africa.
Despite the initial reluctance of Dr. Epstein who attended the speech — he sat in the back so he could escape quickly — his excitement grew the longer Dr. Burkitt. By the time the lecture was over, he knew he had to drop all his ongoing projects to find the cause of that unusual malignancy. His doctoral student, Yvonne Barrsoon joined him and, in 1964, their groundbreaking research discovered the first virus capable of causing cancer in humans.
He shook the scientific world with the announcement. Some physicians and scientists applauded the discovery; others refuse to accept it.
Dr. died. Epstein on Feb. 6 at his home in London. He was 102. His death was confirmed by the University of Bristol, where he was a professor of pathology from 1968 to 1985, and where he served as head of department for 15 years.
The pathogen that came in his name and Dr. Barr — Epstein-Barr virus — belongs to the herpes family and is one of the most ubiquitous on the planet. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s adult population carries the virus, also known as EBV
“Having the insight and being able to follow his hypothesis, with a little known serendipity, and identify the novel virus was pioneering,” said Dr. Darryl Hill, who heads the University of Bristol’s School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine in England, in an email.
Studies since the discovery by Dr. Epstein has linked EBV, which spreads through close human contact, to several medical conditions, including multiple sclerosis and chronic Covid. Like other members of the herpes family, once infected with the virus, a person is infected for life.
“Most people don’t know they’re infected,” Jeffrey Cohen, the head of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The New York Times in 2022.
EBV is the cause of mononucleosis, the so-called kissing disease, which mainly affects teenagers and young adults with fever and swollen lymph nodes. It is also associated with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a cancer of the nose and throat that is common in China.
The tumor that affects children in Africa, known as Burkitt lymphoma, has also been diagnosed in other tropical regions, such as Brazil and New Guinea. Medical scientists say that EBV causes pediatric lymphomas in tropical zones because children in such areas often have weakened immunity from exposure to malaria parasites. The World Health Organization estimates that there are three to six cases of Burkitt lymphoma per 100,000 children annually in endemic regions.
When celebrating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of EBV in 2014, Dr. Epstein told a BBC interviewer what he was thinking as he listened to Dr. Burkitt in 1961.
“I thought there must be some biological agent involved,” said Dr. Epstein. “I was working with cancer-causing chicken viruses. I had a virus-inducing tumor on the front of my head.”
The chicken virus he was referring to was the Rous sarcoma virus, the first cancer-causing virus discovered, in 1911 by Dr. Francis Peyton Rous, a pathologist at Rockefeller University in New York. Dr. won. Rous of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Although a Nobel eluded Dr. Epstein and Dr. Barr, their discovery had a lasting impact on science and medicine.
“We now know that some viruses and bacterial species can cause some types of cancer,” said Dr. Hill. “However, one could argue that the discovery of the Epstein-Barr virus paved the way for some cancers to be prevented by vaccination.”
Vaccines are available against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes cervical and other types of cancer. The hepatitis B vaccine helps prevent liver cancer. But there is no vaccine against Epstein-Barr, although two vaccine candidates are in the early stages of clinical research.
Virus detection is not fast. Dr. sent Burkitt of tumor biopsies in London from Kampala, Uganda, but Dr. Epstein viruses in the first specimens, according to Dr. Hill, who wrote a worry of Dr. Epstein for the University of Bristol.
When another shipment of biopsies was transferred from Heathrow Airport to another airport, in Manchester, England, due to fog, the sample appeared to have been damaged, said Dr. Hill.
“By the time the sample reached Tony, it had turned cloudy — usually a sign of bacterial contamination that would have sent it to the bin,” wrote Dr. Hill in his tribute. “Tony didn’t throw it away but checked it carefully,”
“He discovered, to his surprise, that the cloudiness was due to lymphoid tumor cells that had been shaken out of the biopsy in transit and were now floating happily in suspension.” He continued, “Tony took this opportunity to find cell lines, derived from the tumor, in culture. He showed that they remained alive indefinitely.”
Studying his new sample with a powerful electron microscope, Dr. Epstein is the unique viral signature of a herpes virus. Dr. called Hill’s discovery was a eureka moment.
Epstein, Dr. Barr and Dr. Bert Achong, who prepared specimens for electron microscopy, announced the discovery in a scientific paper published in the March 1964 issue of the scientific journal The Lancet.
Dr. died. Barr at age 83 in 2016.
Michael Anthony Epstein was born on May 18, 1921, in London and studied at Trinity College of the University of Cambridge. He graduated from Middlesex Hospital Medical School, according to Wolfson College at the University of Oxford.
After leaving the University of Bristol in 1985, Dr. Epstein became a fellow at 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 partner, Dr. Katherine Ward, a virologist; two sons from his marriage, Michael and Simon; and a daughter, Susan Holmes.
said Dr. Epstein told the BBC in 2014 that one of his most passionate aspirations was to develop a vaccine against EBV. His wish could come true in the not-too-distant future if current research holds up.
