This article is part of it It is overlookeda series of obituaries for notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in the Times.
Yvonne Barr was a 31-year-old research assistant looking for a new challenge when she was hired by a pathologist in London in 1963 to help find the cause of an unusual malignancy: extremely large facial tumors in Ugandan children.
The pathologist, Anthony Epstein, was pretty sure the tumors were caused by a virus, but struggled to prove his case.
Barr was then known for her superior laboratory skills, having worked on the bacterium that causes Hansen’s disease, commonly called leprosy, as well as other projects.
While he had mastered cell culture techniques—essentially promoting cell growth under controlled conditions—Epstein had trouble maintaining cell growth in his laboratory.
“That was the key to the research — propagating cells that can continue to grow and become experimental samples,” said Gregory J. Morgan, author of Cancer Virus Hunters: A History of Tumor Virology (2022). “Yvonne Barr had experience producing and caring for cell cultures before she came to Epstein’s lab in 1963, and that may be why he hired her.”
Together, they would go on to make one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century: the first virus linked to causing cancer in humans, which became known as the Epstein-Barr virus.
Epstein’s death last month was covered by news outlets around the world. But when Barr died in 2016, few newspapers reported it, likely because soon after the virus was discovered in 1964, she turned to a quiet career in teaching, which she pursued for decades.
Barr had initially sought research positions in Australia, where she had moved with her husband, but was unable to land them.
“Her case shows the pervasive sexism of biomedicine in the mid-20th century,” said Morgan, an associate professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. and was unable to obtain a permanent position.’
Yvonne Margaret Barr was born on March 11, 1932, in Carlow, Ireland, about an hour southwest of Dublin, the eldest of four children to Robert and Gertrude Barr. Her father was a bank manager.
He graduated from Banbridge Academy, Northern Ireland, as head prefect, a position awarded to students who are designated as leaders and mentors. At Trinity College, Dublin, he shone again, gaining a degree in zoology and graduating with honors in 1953.
Through work as a research assistant from 1955 to 1962 she acquired her laboratory skills. At the National Institute of Medical Research in London, he worked on the bacterium that causes leprosy and learned the cell propagation technique known as cell culture.
A second position, as a research assistant at the University of Toronto, allowed another opportunity to hone laboratory skills in experiments involving canine distemper virus, a pathogen that can cause severe and often fatal infection in dogs as well as other animals .
But as Barr mastered cell culture techniques, Epstein, who worked at the Middlesex Hospital School of Medicine in London, struggled with them, Morgan said.
In 1963, Epstein received a $45,000 research grant from the US National Institutes of Health and hired Barr and Bert Achong, an expert in electron microscopy. Both would complete PhDs while working in Epstein’s lab.
Epstein was already working with Denis Burkitt, a surgeon and Presbyterian missionary in Uganda, who was sending tissue samples to London from biopsied facial tumors afflicting Ugandan children.
The cancer was known as Burkitt’s lymphoma, and because the tumors occurred in certain equatorial locations, Epstein strongly suspected a viral cause. What he needed was a more efficient way to grow cells that probably carried the virus.
With Barr’s techniques, the team was able to preserve groups of cells. Their research was the first to use cell culture techniques to study human B cells, the ones affected in Burkitt’s lymphoma, Morgan said.
In July 2022, the Irish Times reported that Barr explained why she believed Epstein’s first attempts had failed. “By the time I got to Middlesex, I had a lot of tissue culture experience,” he wrote in an undated memoir. “I felt that Epstein was throwing out the good cells. I applied my methods and every few days I gave the cells a wash and new food.’
A tumor sample from Burkitt that initially seemed doomed after fog at Heathrow delayed delivery turned out to be the one that bore definitive evidence of a causative virus.
“One day some of them were shining and that was thought to be a sign of life,” Barr said, speaking from Australia, at a conference in London via video in 2014. “There was a lot of excitement and it was about getting enough electron microscopy.”
From this cluster of cells, Achong captured a clear image, and Epstein immediately recognized the clear signature of a herpes virus that was new to science. The culprit was found. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania confirmed the results.
“The virus got its name from the cell culture it was found in,” Morgan explained. “Cell cultures were labeled EB1, for Epstein Barr 1, EB2, EB3, etc.”
Epstein-Barr virus, or EBV, is also the cause of mononucleosis and is strongly associated with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s adult population carries the virus.
Barr received her PhD in 1966, a year after her marriage to Stuart Balding, an industrial chemist. After immigrating to Australia, they had two children, Kirsten and Sean Balding. She earned a degree in education and became a high school math and science teacher. Her work in biomedical research had ended with the discovery in Epstein’s laboratory.
“She thought of the discovery as a small part of her life,” Kirsten Balding said in an interview. “I think she loved being a teacher and helping kids.”
Barr died on February 13, 2016 in Melbourne after multiple medical problems, including diabetes and congestive heart failure, her daughter said. It was 83.
