Sir Michael Anthony Epstein

Abstract Sir Michael Anthony (Tony) Epstein will forever be known for his discovery of the eponymous Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), the first human tumour virus and the foundation stone of a new science, human tumour virology. After medical training, Epstein began a research career at the Middlesex Hospital, working on a deeply unfashionable subject, the possibility that certain human cancers have a viral aetiology. The turning point came through a chance meeting in 1961 with a surgeon, Denis Burkitt (FRS 1962), who described a childhood cancer, subsequently called Burkitt lymphoma (BL), that was common throughout equatorial Africa. Reasoning that this might be caused by a virus, possibly arthropod-borne, Epstein began to examine samples of the tumour using the then novel technique of electron microscopy. Once Epstein and his research assistant Yvonne Barr learned how to grow the tumour in culture, electron microscopy revealed cells replicating virus particles. This proved to be a new human herpesvirus, EBV, that was not only consistently found in all cases of African BL but is now linked to seven different human tumours, together totalling 200 000 new cancer cases globally per year. Epstein spent the rest of his working life studying the virus, establishing a research-based pathology department in Bristol and pioneering a primate model of EBV-induced lymphomagenesis that became a test-bed for his long-term goal of EBV vaccine development. Remarkably, he lived long enough to see the first clinical trials of a prophylactic EBV vaccine begin, some 60 years after his ground-breaking discovery.