By Dorothy H. Crawford,
Alan Rickinson, and Ingólfur Johannessen
Oxford University Press, April 2014
The idea that viruses can cause cancer is somewhat commonplace in the scientific community these days. But it wasn’t always so. In 1964, British researchers Anthony Epstein, Bert Achong, and Yvonne Barr, studying childhood cancers that were cropping up in Africa, put a sample of tumor cells under an electron microscope and saw it swimming with virus particles. Although the researchers initially thought the particles were a common type of herpesvirus, they later discovered that it was in fact a new human herpesvirus that had caused the tumors they were studying.
In Cancer Virus, infectious disease researcher Dorothy Crawford, cancer scientist Alan Rickinson, and virologist Ingólfur Johannessen, tell the story of what was, at the time, still a revolutionary idea. The authors revisit the foundational work that led up to the discovery of Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), ...
