Pathologist helped discover the Epstein-barr virus
Anthony Epstein, a British pathologist whose chance attendance at a lecture on childhood tumors in Africa began years of scientific sleuthing that led to the discovery of the ultra-common Epstein-barr virus and opened expansive research into its viral links to cancers and other chronic ailments, died Feb. 6 at his home in London. He was 102.
Epstein’s work in the 1960s to isolate the virus — a type of herpes — set the foundation for sweeping studies into viral and biological triggers for cancers such as Hodgkin’s lymphoma and potential links to other diseases including multiple sclerosis, lupus and, most recently, so-called long Covid.
The research later expanded to detect other cancer-causing viruses such the human papillomavirus, or HPV. Unlike HPV, however, no vaccine has been developed for Epstein-barr, named for Epstein and colleague Yvonne Barr, which is believed present in more than 90 percent of the world’s population.
“Everyone is putting a brick in the wall,” Epstein said about the multiple fronts of research on the Epstein-barr virus. “It is the accumulation of bricks which makes the building.”
For most people, Epstein-barr is a silent hitchhiker. It is spread through saliva and other bodily fluids and often acquired during childhood. The virus sits in throat and blood cells, maybe flaring up as mononucleosis or a bout of lethargy, or with no symptoms at all. Yet in some cases, the virus takes off by rapid replication in host cells.
“It’s very stealthy,” Jeffrey Cohen, the chief of the infectious-diseases laboratory at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the New York Times in 2022.
This is the point where the science gets hazier. There’s consensus that a surge in the Epstein-barr virus has an association with some cancers of the stomach, nasal system and blood. Less clear is how much the virus acts as a possible springboard for other cancers, serious inflammations such as viral meningitis and an array of autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis.
For Epstein, the unfulfilled search for a vaccine remained a lifelong frustration. In the latest vaccine efforts, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 2022 began the first clinical trials in more than a decade. “The chain is not understood but the evidence is,” said Epstein on how the virus appears to contribute to higher rates of cancers and diseases. “But without (the virus) you don’t have a continuous chain … (and) you can remove that by vaccinating to prevent infection.”
Michael Anthony Epstein was born in London on May 18, 1921. He studied at Trinity College at the University of Oxford and Middlesex Hospital Medical School.
After serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps following World War II, he returned to Middlesex Hospital as an assistant pathologist. His early medical research probed the Rous sarcoma retrovirus, a cancercausing virus that was first observed in birds.
Epstein was a professor of pathology at the University of Bristol from 1968 to 1985 and then was a fellow at Wolfson College at the University of Oxford
until his retirement in 2001. Epstein was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991.
Epstein’s marriage to Lisbeth Knight ended in divorce. In addition to his partner, Ward, survivors include three children from his marriage, Simon Epstein, Michael Epstein and Susan Holmes.
In 1991, at Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, England, Epstein and Burkitt discussed the events leading to the Epsteinbarr discovery.
“It was a series of accidents, really,” Epstein said, smiling. “Lucky quirks.”
“But you have to have two things,” said Burkitt. “You have to have the accident, as it were, and the mind that can interpret them and look behind them and see their meaning.”
“Well, of course, that’s what Louis Pasteur said, wasn’t it?” Epstein replied. “‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’”