While trying to grow common cold viruses, he and his colleague Dr. Wallace Rowe first tried to use adenoid and tonsil tissue, before using a culture based on tumor cells. From that culture they isolated cytomegalovirus, as well as the first of a large family of adenoviruses. Dr. Robert M. Chanock said the discovery "put him up there with Sabin" (creator of the oral polio vaccine) as one of the "great moments in virology". Based on their observations, Huebner and Rowe hypothesized that these viruses could trigger an unknown gene that would cause cells to grow out of control.