Thursday, March 28, 2024

A01602 - Yvonne Barr, Virologist Who Helped Discover the Epstein-Barr Virus

 

Overlooked No More: Yvonne Barr, Who Helped Discover a Cancer-Causing Virus

A virologist, she worked with the pathologist Anthony Epstein, who died last month, in finding for the first time that a virus that could cause cancer. It’s known as the Epstein-Barr virus.

A black and white photo of Yvonne Barr sitting in front of a brick wall and wearing a dress with polka dots.
Yvonne Barr in 1962. Her techniques in growing cell cultures in a controlled environment aided in the discovery of the Epstein-Barr virus.Credit...Gregory Morgan

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

Yvonne Barr was a 31-year-old research assistant seeking a new challenge when she was hired by a pathologist in London in 1963 to help find the cause of an unusual malignancy: exceptionally large facial tumors in Ugandan children.

The pathologist, Anthony Epstein, was almost certain that the tumors were caused by a virus, but he was struggling to prove his hypothesis.

Barr was by 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.

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While she had mastered cell culture techniques — essentially promoting the growth of cells under controlled conditions — Epstein was having trouble sustaining the growth of cells in his lab.

“This was a key to the research — propagating cells that can continue to grow and become experimental specimens,” 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 coming to Epstein’s lab in 1963, and perhaps this is why he hired her.”

Together, they would go on to make one of the 20th century’s most significant scientific discoveries: the first virus linked to causing cancer in humans, which came to be known as the Epstein-Barr virus.

Epstein’s death last month was noted by news outlets around the world. But when Barr died in 2016, few newspapers reported it, most likely because soon after the virus discovery, in 1964, she pivoted to a quiet career in teaching, which she pursued for decades.

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Barr had first sought research positions in Australia, where she had moved with her husband, but was unable to land one.

“Her case illustrates the pervasive sexism of mid-20th century biomedicine,” said Morgan, an associate professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. “She found science in Australia a bit of a boys club and could not obtain a permanent position.”

Yvonne Margaret Barr was born on March 11, 1932, in Carlow, Ireland, about an hour southwest of Dublin, the oldest of four children of Robert and Gertrude Barr. Her father was a banking manager.

She graduated from Banbridge Academy, in Northern Ireland, as head prefect, a position awarded to students designated as leaders and mentors. At Trinity College, in Dublin, she shined again, earning a degree in zoology and graduating with honors in 1953.

It was through jobs as research assistants from 1955 to 1962 that she gained her laboratory skills. At the London National Institute for Medical Research, she worked on the bacterium that causes leprosy and learned the cell propagation technique known as cell culture.

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A second position, as a research assistant at the University of Toronto, allowed yet another opportunity to hone lab skills in experiments involving canine distemper virus, a pathogen that can cause a serious and often fatal infection in dogs as well as in other animals.

But as Barr was mastering cell culture techniques, Epstein, who worked at Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London, was struggling with them, Morgan said.

In 1963, Epstein received a $45,000 research grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and hired Barr and Bert Achong, an expert in electron microscopy. Both would complete doctorates while working in Epstein’s lab.

Epstein was already collaborating 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 lymphoma, and because the tumors occurred in certain equatorial locations, Epstein strongly suspected a viral cause. What he needed was a more effective way to grow cells that possibly harbored the virus.

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With Barr’s techniques, the team was able to sustain clusters of cells. Their research was the first to use cell culture techniques to study human B cells, the ones affected in Burkitt lymphoma, Morgan said.

In July 2022, The Irish Times quoted Barr as explaining why she thought Epstein’s early efforts weren’t working. “By the time I arrived at the Middlesex, I had a lot of tissue culture experience,” she wrote in an undated recollection. “I felt Epstein was throwing out the good cells. I applied my methods and every few days gave the cells a wash and new food.”

A tumor sample from Burkitt that initially seemed doomed after fog at Heathrow Airport delayed the delivery, turned out to be the one bearing definitive evidence of a causative virus.

“One day some of them were glistening, and that was thought to be a sign of life,” Barr, speaking from Australia, told a London conference by video in 2014. “There was great excitement, and the thing was to get enough for electron microscopy.”

From that cell cluster, Achong captured a crisp image, and Epstein immediately recognized the clear signature of a herpes virus that was new to science. The culprit was found. University of Pennsylvania researchers confirmed the results.

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“The virus was named after the cell culture in which it was found,” Morgan explained. “The cell cultures were labeled EB1, for Epstein Barr 1, EB2, EB3, etc.”

Epstein-Barr virus, or E.B.V., 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 a doctorate in 1966, a year after her marriage to Stuart Balding, an industrial chemist. After emigrating to Australia, they had two children, Kirsten and Sean Balding. She earned a diploma in education and became a high school math and science teacher. Her work in biomedical research had ended with the discovery in Epstein’s lab.

“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 Feb. 13, 2016, in Melbourne after developing multiple medical problems, including diabetes and congestive heart failure, her daughter said. She was 83.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

A01601 - Shani Mott, Black Studies Scholar at Johns Hopkins University

 

Shani Mott, Black Studies Scholar Who Examined Power All Around Her, Dies at 47

Her work looked at how race and power are experienced in America. In 2022, she filed a lawsuit saying that the appraisal of her home was undervalued because of bias.

Nathan Connolly and Shani Mott stand on a stone pathway in front of a red brick home, surrounded by greenery.
Shani Mott with her husband, Nathan Connolly, at their home in Baltimore.Credit...Shan Wallace for The New York Times

Shani Mott, a scholar of Black studies at Johns Hopkins University whose examinations of race and power in America extended beyond the classroom to her employer, her city and even her own home, has died in Baltimore. She was 47.

She died of adrenal cancer on March 12, said her husband, Nathan Connolly, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins.

Though Dr. Mott spent her career in some of academia’s elite spaces, she was committed to the idea that scholarship should be grounded and tangible, and not succumb to ivory tower abstraction. She encouraged students to turn a critical eye to their own backgrounds and to the realities of the world around them. In a city like Baltimore, with its complicated and often cruel racial history, there was plenty to scrutinize.

“How do we think about what we’re doing and how it relates to a city like Baltimore?” is how Minkah Makalani, the director of the university’s Center for Africana Studies, described some of the questions that drove Dr. Mott’s work. “There was this kind of demanding intellectual curiosity that she had that she brought to everything that really pushed the conversation and required that people think about what we’re doing in more tangible ways.”

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Her research focused on American books, both popular and literary, and how they revealed the kind of conversation about race that was allowed by the publishing industry and other cultural gatekeepers. This work connected to a larger theme of her scholarship: how big institutions determine how race is discussed and experienced in America.

As an active member of the Johns Hopkins faculty, she pointedly explored the ways the university engaged, or did not engage, with its own workers and the majority Black city in which it sits. In 2018 and 2019, Dr. Mott was a principal investigator for the Housing Our Story project, which interviewed Black staff workers at Johns Hopkins whose voices had not been included in the campus archives.

“What she had a keen ability to do was to say and remember that we’re thinking of things that are real, not just abstract,” said Tara Bynum, an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa who received her doctorate at Johns Hopkins.

Though Dr. Mott taught her students to understand racism as a continuing force in American life, the hard reality could still be jarring. In 2021, she and Dr. Connolly were hoping to refinance the mortgage on their home, which sits in a historic, predominantly white neighborhood. But the appraisal was far lower than what they were expecting, and their application for a refinance loan was denied.

Believing that race played a key role, they applied for a loan again several months later, but for this appraisal they hid evidence of their race, such as family photographs, and had a white colleague stand in for them when the appraiser came for a visit. The second appraisal was almost 60 percent higher than the first.

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Months later, in 2022, they sued the mortgage company that denied the loan, the appraisal company that was contracted and the individual appraiser who was at the home. All parties have denied that bias was involved, and the individual appraiser countersued for defamation.

On Monday, Dr. Connolly announced a settlement with the mortgage company. The case involving the appraisal company and the appraiser, and the defamation lawsuit remain pending.

For Dr. Mott, it was a discouraging real-world illustration of what she had long researched.

“People say it all the time: It’s one thing to study something, but it’s an entirely different thing to actually experience it,” she said in a 2022 interview with The Times. She understood discrimination through her work, she said, but “to actually be living a kind of life that was always a dream and then to have someone in 45 minutes come in and just ruin that, or try to — it leaves me feeling angry.”

Shani Tahir Mott was born on March 16, 1976, in Chicago. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father was an Army veteran who lost his sight in the Vietnam War.

After graduating from Wesleyan University, she received her master’s degree and doctorate at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation focused on midcentury American literature, particularly books in which Black authors portrayed white characters and in which white authors portrayed Black characters. Such attempts by writers to “free themselves from the racial boundaries” that the country kept in place were ultimately unsuccessful, she concluded.

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She considered the work she did outside of academia consistent with her research. In Baltimore, she encouraged students to work alongside her as volunteers at Orita’s Cross Freedom School, a program that provides instruction and recreation for Black youth when their families are at work. In 2020, when many of those children were stuck at home during Covid, Dr. Mott and her family produced a series of YouTube videos in which they read and discussed children’s books celebrating Black history and culture.

Her survivors include her husband and their children, two daughters and a son.

Dr. Mott was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, but colleagues said she continued to keep a packed schedule of teaching and outside projects. Days before her death, she gave an eight-hour deposition in the appraisal suit, Dr. Connolly said. She declined to take her pain medication, he added, so that she would be able to respond to questions with clarity.

“She burned through two oxygen tanks and was in a wheelchair the entire time,” Dr. Connolly said. “And her ability to speak forcefully and to be direct and, frankly, to be so crystal clear about how real estate works and, in particular, instruments within the structure of a mortgage transaction, it was a master class.”