Anthony Epstein: pathologist and virologist who jointly discovered the Epstein-Barr virus

In March 1961 a lunchtime talk by Irish “bush surgeon” Dennis Burkitt at the Middlesex Hospital, London, left young pathologist Anthony Epstein “hopping up and down” in feverish excitement. He decided during the talk to abandon all his other work immediately to hunt for what became known as the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). It was the first human virus shown to cause cancer.

Based in Uganda, Burkitt speculated that a virus might cause the cancer later named after him. The distribution of Burkitt’s lymphoma (BL), Africa’s commonest childhood cancer, seemed to be related to the high temperatures and heavy, year round rainfall in the malarial belt.

The idea that a virus could cause cancer was controversial in the 1960s—even though viruses are now estimated to account for 15-20% of human cancers. But Epstein immediately suspected a biological agent after his several years of research with cancer causing viruses in chickens. He arranged for BL tumour samples to be flown from Uganda to his laboratory at the Bland-Sutton Institute of Pathology in London. After two years of failing to extract virus from samples, he became worried. “I had no letter of appointment, no terms and conditions of service, and I didn’t know from one year to the next if the head of department would reappoint me.”