It didn’t look like a superb factor when a valuable consignment of human tumour samples on its manner from Kampala, Uganda, to Heathrow was diverted to Manchester. When the samples lastly arrived on the Middlesex hospital in London, they have been swimming in murky fluid of their vials as if they’d been contaminated with micro organism.
However when the pathologist Anthony Epstein appeared on the fluid below the microscope he noticed no micro organism, simply particular person cells that had been shaken unfastened from the tumours. And that was simply what he wanted in an effort to seek for elusive virus particles and check his hunch that they have been inflicting most cancers.
Within the early Sixties Epstein, who has died aged 102, had heard a lecture by Denis Burkitt, an Irish surgeon working in Kampala, that described unusual tumours (now referred to as Burkitt lymphoma) rising across the jaws of youngsters in equatorial Africa.
Intriguingly, the geographical distribution of the situation appeared to rely on temperature and rainfall, suggesting a organic trigger. Epstein, who had been working with viruses that trigger most cancers in chickens, instantly suspected a virus may be concerned, maybe in affiliation with one other tropical illness resembling malaria.
Epstein started to collaborate with Burkitt, who equipped him with tumours from youngsters he had handled. However Epstein’s efforts to develop items of tumour within the laboratory and isolate a virus had all been unsuccessful till the dissociated cells arrived.
Along with his graduate pupil Yvonne Barr, he then determined to take a look at cultures of those cells in an electron microscope, a strong instrument that had solely not too long ago develop into out there in his lab.
The very first picture confirmed a tell-tale define that appeared like one of many household of herpes viruses. It turned out to be a beforehand undescribed member of that household, and was given the identify Epstein-Barr virus. In 1964, Epstein, Barr and Epstein’s analysis assistant, Bert Achong, printed the primary proof that most cancers in people might be brought on by a virus – to be greeted by widespread scepticism regardless that they went on to show that EB virus prompted tumours in monkeys.
Due to samples equipped by Epstein, in 1970 Werner and Gertrude Henle on the Kids’s hospital in Philadelphia found that EB virus additionally prompted glandular fever. That made it potential to design a check for antibodies to the virus in an effort to affirm a analysis. EB virus turned out to be quite common, infecting most kids in adolescence, although it often causes glandular fever solely in older youngsters and younger adults. In addition to inflicting Burkitt lymphoma in endemic areas in Africa and Papua New Guinea, additionally it is related to a most cancers of the nostril and throat that’s the most typical most cancers of males in south China, in addition to cancers in individuals whose immune techniques have been compromised, resembling these contaminated with HIV.
Newer analysis means that EB virus may also be concerned in some circumstances of a number of sclerosis, and that individuals who have beforehand had glandular fever are extra prone to extreme Covid-19.
After the invention, Epstein and others devoted effort and time to looking for out below what circumstances EB virus causes most cancers. The connection between the virus, different ailments, human genetics and most cancers is complicated, and it took a long time earlier than the medical neighborhood may settle for the EB virus as a trigger with confidence.
Not till 1997 did the Worldwide Company for Analysis on Most cancers class it as a Group 1 carcinogen, formally acknowledging its position in quite a lot of cancers.
The invention of EB virus opened up a complete new area of analysis into cancer-causing viruses. It additionally raised the thrilling risk of stopping cancers by means of vaccination, an advance that has now been achieved within the case of human papilloma virus, which causes cervical most cancers, and hepatitis B virus, which causes liver most cancers.
By the point of his retirement in 1985, Epstein’s analysis group on the College of Bristol had developed a candidate vaccine that protected monkeys contaminated with EB virus in opposition to tumours, however neither it nor some other candidate has but been efficiently developed for human use.
Epstein was born in London, one in all three youngsters of Olga (nee Oppenheimer) and Mortimer Epstein. Mortimer was a author and translator who edited The Statesman’s Yearbook for Macmillan from 1924 till his dying in 1946. Olga was concerned with charitable work within the Jewish neighborhood. Anthony attended St Paul’s faculty in west London, the place the biology instructor Sidney Pask inspired boys to go far past the syllabus and whose pupils additionally included Robert Winston and Jonathan Miller.
Epstein gained a spot to review drugs at Trinity Faculty, Cambridge. He moved to Middlesex hospital medical faculty in wartime London to finish his coaching, earlier than doing his nationwide service in India with the Royal Military Medical Corps. He returned to work on the Middlesex hospital as assistant pathologist, conducting his personal analysis. Pondering electron microscopy may be helpful in his research of cancer-causing viruses in chickens, he spent a while studying the brand new approach on the Rockefeller Institute in New York (now Rockefeller College). Not lengthy afterwards he attended Burkitt’s lecture and commenced the serendipitous path to his discovery.
In 1968 he was appointed professor and head of the division of pathology on the College of Bristol, the place he remained till his retirement. He moved to Oxford as a fellow of Wolfson Faculty in 1986, turning into an honorary fellow in 2001.
An exemplary scientific good citizen, he served as international secretary and vice-president of the Royal Society, and sat on boards and councils for quite a few nationwide and worldwide analysis organisations, together with as a particular consultant of the director normal of Unesco; he was additionally a patron of Humanists UK. Amongst his many prizes and honorary levels, he obtained the worldwide Gairdner award for biomedical analysis in 1988. He was appointed CBE in 1985 and knighted in 1991.
“It was a collection of accidents, actually,” he stated of his discovery in a dialog with Burkitt they recorded for Oxford Brookes College’s oral historical past archive in 1991. “Fortunate quirks.” Burkitt instantly responded with Louis Pasteur’s aphorism: “Probability favours the ready thoughts.”
Epstein was a deeply cultured man who retained a vigorous curiosity in lots of topics – notably oriental rugs, Tibet and amphibians – till the top of his life.
He’s survived by his accomplice, Kate Ward, by his youngsters Susan, Simon and Michael, from his marriage to Lisbeth Knight, from whom he was separated in 1965, and who died in 2015, and by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
