It starts with a little bit of a sore throat, then a runny nose, headache, you feel tired all day, You got a cold. Cold viruses infect most of us on average two or three times a year, and we just accept colds as a fact of life. But what if we didn't have to.
A Ministry of Health research unit at Harvard Hospital Salisbury has been investigating the common code and volunteers human guinea pigs have been living there in pairs for ten days at the time.
That's an old movie tone newsreel, and it's about the Common Cold Unit. The Common Cold Unit or CCU was a scientific institution that opened in the UK in nineteen forty six, and for decades, volunteers went there in order to be infected with the common cold. Then researchers would study what happened next. Their ultimate goal was to figure out which virus or viruses caused colds and whether science could finally make the common cold disappear for good. The
Common Cold Unit became pretty famous in its day. Volunteers went back a year after year. Some of them even fell in love there, got married, and more than a few famous scientists started their careers spraying cold viruses up people's noses. In the end, the CCU failed to achieve
its main goal. It did not produce a cure for or a vaccine to prevent the common cold, but it did lay the groundwork for a lot of what we know today about viruses, and the stories of what scientists learned at the Common Cold Unit and how they learned it are amazing and delightful. Snotty tissues may never again play such a pivotal role in scientific research. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and you're listening to Incubation, a show about all the
other viruses. In previous episodes, we found out how science progressed from Edward Jenner's early work on smallpox to the development of the polio vaccine to the twenty first century design of a vaccine for RSV. But even after all this progress, we're still missing some simple answers. Today we're going deep on the common cold. We're going to talk about what we know and what we don't know about
the many viruses that cause it. A lot of what we do know comes from research on human volunteers in the UK who went to the Common Cold Unit and signed up to get sick. Our first guest today is Katie David. She's a curator at the Science Museum in London and she oversees a collection that includes vintage snotty tissues and other artifacts from the CCU.
I've worked at the Science Museum for quite a few years and the first time I encountered the Common Cold Unit was about ten years ago. And we've got this amazingly large object store in West London, and you see all sorts of weird and wonderful things. But I was in one room and I could see this like really flowery armchair and it just sort of struck me as so strange. You know, it's not an X ray machine,
it's not a stethoscope. I sort of did a bit of digging and basically it was an armchair from the Common Cold Unit. It was part of the volunteers, the kind of furniture they would have sat on and there that's how I first discovered this weird and wonderful place called the Common Cold You know.
It plays so amazing then even just a cheer from there belongs in a museum. Absolutely, it's okay. The Common Cold Unit was set up in this basically this abandoned hospital in the British countryside right after World War Two? How does this happen? Like, what's the story there.
There's a British virologist called Christopher Andrews, and he has been over to the States and seen this amazing research with American scientists who are using chimpanzee models, which appear to be the only animal model at that point where you could transmit the common cold and start investigating it. But you know, Britain, post war, chimpanzees are not easy to come by to do this type of research. So what's definitely the next best thing are human volunteers, So human guinea peas.
I thinks we're basically not we don't have enough of a research culture to do chimpanzees, but we.
Don't have people, well we have people, we have medical students, which are definitely know one of the next best things. And so he sort of is aware of this, you know, infectious disease hospital, and it's so isolated that he sees it as an opportunity that actually you can start carrying
out these volunteer medical studies into the common cold. So in July nineteen forty six, so just a few months after this site gets set up, they're welcoming their first volunteers to be infected with the common cold and to see if they could transmit it.
Why set up a whole unit just to study the common cold?
I mean, the common cold just seems I mean, it almost seems relatively trivial to us today. But it's not that long after the Spanish influenza epidemic, so there's a lot of research into influenza and the cold and viruses
and bacteria in general. In the nineteen thirties, you know, coming out of the war, there's a real need to rebuild Britain and Europe, and there's real worries about productivity in Britain, like so many people are taking sick days, they're going absent from work, and actually, is there a really easy way we could solve what was causing the common cold, find a cure and encourage more people to stay healthy and not seek how expensive medical visits to doctors at the time.
And there is this real problem every year everybody is, you know, missing a week of work because they're sick with the cold. If we could fix that, is this moment of faith in science and progress, right, If we could find a cure for the common cold. That would be a huge boon to productivity.
Absolutely. I mean there's this real spirit of trying to solve these issues. You know that they're identifying influenza, that were coming up with new vaccines for lots of conditions.
Right, maybe we could find a vaccine so everybody, every when your baby you get a shot, you never have to get a called.
Amazing, absolutely and who wouldn't take that option if you could?
I would take it now in a heartbeat. So what did scientists know? How did you know humanity know about the common cold at this time in nineteen forty six? Do we know it was virus? Do we know which virus?
So really little. There was definitely inklings that it was some form of virus, but very little known about it at all. It was very much this open question to understand what was causing the common cold? Was the one cause, worsler, multiple causes? How is it being transmitted? They were also interested in like in terms of causes, like common myths and things. If you stand out in the rain and
the cold, does getting a chill cause the cold? You know, there were lots of really important questions to explore.
So we got the questions we got the place. The Common Cold unit is open. How does it work?
So the research team advertised for volunteers. They send out adverts into local newspapers to say things like ten day free break in the autumn and winter. You might not win a Nobel prize, but you will help find a cure for the common cold.
Okay.
The trials sort of lasted for around by two weeks, and they take thirty volunteers would be split into two groups and they would live in these little huts on site. So married couples could stay in the same little volunteer flat, but unmarried couples absolutely, you know, prohibited. And really as a volunteer, this was like an amazing opportunity to almost have a lovely holiday stay, a relaxing stay. You would be paid a very small amount of money about one
pounds seventy five a week or something like that. You'd have your travel expenses paid, but then you'd get three meals a day. It was very relaxing. You know, you could read, you could study, you could go for walks on the countryside.
And let's be clear, you know, post war Britain is a tough place economically. I mean Britain won the war, but it got destroyed absolutely.
I mean, rationing doesn't end. So like the mid nineteen fifties, people really want to volunteer and help Britain and you know, it really feels like they're doing something something good.
Let me ask you this, Okay, So that's the fun side. You get three meals in your tocula country. What do you got to do? What do you got to do? If you're a volunteer there.
You turn up, Say, if you turn up on a Wednesday, you'd first have to quarantine for three days to make sure that you weren't infectious with you know, a cold already. So assuming after those three days you were fine and well, you would then be infected with somebody else's nasal washings.
How are you infected with someone else's nasal washings? What does that actually mean?
So often it would be like just through nose swabs, but sometimes it was sprayed. They'd be inventing all sorts of crazy apparatus to replicate a sneez droplets and things like that.
Basically for a lot of people that the scientists.
Give you a cold, yeah, absolutely, and then for the next week you're just observed. And so some people after a couple of days would develop a cold, and the researchers would collect all their snotty tissues and try and incubate and analyze what the material in those snotty tissues, and then other people never developed anything and had a
very thoroughly pleasant stay. I mean really only about a third of the volunteers would ever get a cold, so actually you had a pretty good chance not getting one at all during the process, and after about ten days you were released back to your regular life.
Let's talk about they had this goal of minding a cure or a vaccine. They thought they might do it in a few years. Spoiler alert they didn't. But let's talk about some of the work that they did there. Let's talk about this not experiment.
Well, one of the amazing things is like actually quite a few famous or sort of really important people worked at the Common Cold Unit, and one of them was James Lovelock, British scientist, and in his early research he was an incredible engineer. He could come up with amazing solutions to shricky experimental problems, and he invented this nasal dropper system. So if you imagine like a thin tube strapped your nose that would drop a solution that contained
a fluorescent dye within it. It was sort of they're simulating a drippy nose essentially. And then the experiment was to simulate, you know, just like a normal everyday activity. The participants were playing cards, we're making cups of tea,
just hanging out for the evening. And at the end of you know, a few hours of just normal at day to day interaction, they turn off the lights and put the fluorescent lamp on and they could see the traces of how this sort of fluorescent die had been transmitted all across different surfaces, across the playing cars, cups, cups, kitchen. It really revealed that act of transmission, that transmission. It wasn't just sort of through inhalation alone.
It's through we're all disgusting and we all get our snot over each other all the time. Basically, you mentioned that at the Common Cold Unity they studied whether being cold makes you catch cold. Was there a particular study you were referring to.
They had participants who stood outside in the cold and the wet yet to test this theory about whether that made them more predisposed to developing The Common Colder and apparently they disprove that.
So, just to be clear, standing out in the cold does not make you more like to get a cald. Just for my mother and for everybody's mother, being cold does not make you catch.
A cold, according to the Common Cold Unit studies at that point in time.
Yes, my mother is a physician, by the way, I feel guilty saying that because she knows, but she still always wanted me to bring a cod So we know they didn't find a cure or a vaccine for the cold, or if they did, they didn't tell anybody because we don't have one. But what did they figure out?
So people have construed the Common Cold Unit as a failure, like a research failure, but over its sort of forty odd years, the unit produced over one thousand research papers. And they started off in these early days trying to find ways to grow the common cold viruses in laboratory cultures. So they worked that out. They revealed lots of insights
around transmission. But really what they did that was exciting is that they discovered rhina viruses and coronaviruses through all the sort of volunteer nasal snots collecting they were doing in analysis so this is a.
Big deal, right, And I understand that the discovery of coronavirus in particular is actually it's actually kind of an interesting story, right.
So there was an amazing researcher virologist called David Tyrrell who started off in nineteen fifty seven as a researcher at the Common Cold Unit, and he's doing really interesting experiments. We all know school kids are such a reservoir of colds.
And essentially every parent knows that.
Yes, every parent knows that. So they invited school groups to have parties at the Comic Cold Center and again would collect nasal specimens from particularly snutting school kids. And after one of the samples from I think about a twelve year old schoolboy in nineteen sixty, David Terrell was researching this specimen and after sort of conducting lots of different experiments trying to identify what type of virus it was, it just didn't match to anything he already knew that existed.
And so by about nineteen sixty five he publishes his first paper saying, oh, I've identified this unknown virus.
To be clear, he knows that it's causing the cold, but he can't throw it. He can't see it.
Yeah, absolutely, so he can't see it's but then he's put in contact with this amazing virologist called June Al Misa. She was born in Glasgow, lived in Glasgow tenements. Her dad was a bus driver. As a young girl, her six year old brother died of dip theory, so you know, she's got really close contact with infectious disease and that sort of inspired her to want to get involved in a medical career.
So I was reading about her when I was getting ready for this interview, and I understand that what she ends up doing is electron microscopy, which at the time it's this relatively new technology. Right, tell me more about that.
She just develops this amazing ability to be able to take virus images. A lot of people describe it like gardening it. You know, there's still an art and a kind of being. It's like being green fingered. To get those images took a lot of preparation and she just was able to do it. She's taking ones of rubellah
for the first time. That causes German Me and David Terrell from the Common Cold Unit becomes aware of these amazing images and her work using an electron microscope, and so he sends her a this sample of this schoolboy snotty tissue and this virus sample, and she's able to prepare it and start taking images, and so for the first time, she images the first ever coronavirus.
So he sends her whatever snotty tissues, the samples from the schoolboy with the mystery virus. And what does she see when she looks at it.
So nobody's visualized a coronavirus before, so she's looking at it for the first time using an electron microscope, and so she sees the slightly round virus particle. But what makes it really different looking is these little projections that
come out of it, these little spiky projections. She described it as like a solar corona, so like the corona you get around the Sun. And it was through these images that she and David and a couple of other virologists agreed on calling this new type of virus they identified coronavirus.
So that sort of stylized image that we all saw a million times over the past three years, of the little circle with the little lines the spikes coming out of it. She was the first one ever to see.
That, yes, she was absolutely the first person to see that.
Why does it end up being a big deal that they discovered the coronavirus?
Obviously, imaging the coronavirus has become a much bigger deal since the pandemic is much more important to us now, But I think it's also important in terms of understanding the history of the common cold and the research and the unit as well. So many different viruses cause the common cold. There isn't one single cause, and so by understanding that there were rhina viruses and coronaviruses and all sorts of different viruses causing the cold, it just complicates
the picture. It just sort of shows that it's really hard to cure the common cold.
So what is the end of the story of the Common Cold Unit.
It's incredible that the Common Cold Unit ran for over forty years, so eventually by nineteen eighty nine they welcome their last volunteers and essentially the Medical Research Council decide to stop funding the site of the Common Cold Unit.
So it's amazing in a way that it's still going on in the eighties, maybe because I'm old enough to remember the eighties and it's like, sure, oh, the forties. This is some weird old timey thing from a long time before I was born, but that it was going on in the eighties when like you know whatever, there were.
Yeah, hugely like genomics and like it.
It seems kind of anachronistic by that point, right.
I mean, the problem of the common cold unit, particularly it starts off being in such an isolated environment, which was such a great thing for this kind of isolating and quarantine study, but actually it was very isolated from the kind of developments within medical research at that time. I know, these amazing other research facilities being built, and so it did begin to be seen as this sort of slightly anachronistic research model in that way.
So when we zoom out and think about this interesting place, what should we make of it?
I mean, for me, I think it's a brilliant story of the willingness of people to volunteer and give their bodies and time to try and solve some medical challenge. And I think it just demonstrates that, you know, often we're after a quick fix, you know, we want things to be easily solved by a vaccine or a simple drug.
Yeah, and I mean, just how complex the common cold is seems like one of the one of the real discoveries of the Common Cold Unit. Anyway, it was great to talk with you. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
Alas, the Common Cold Unit did not in fact get rid of colds forever, but scientists still draw on that research to understand how virus is spread and how they work inside our bodies, how cold viruses make us feel sick, and what we can do to make ourselves feel better. That's when incubation returns. One of the things that those researchers in the UK discovered as they studied the common
cold for decades, there is no single culprit. In fact, we now know that more than two hundred different viruses cause this group of symptoms that we lump under the term common cold. The biggest group of viruses is called rhinoviruses rhino from the Greek for nos like in rhinoceros. Scientists now believe that rhinoviruses cause somewhere around half of all colds. There is in fact a good chance that at this very minute I am fighting off a rhinovirus.
So lucky me as host of this show, I get to call up a leading expert on rhinoviruses and ask him for some explanations, some advice. The expert's name is Gary MacLean and he's an emeritus professor at London Metropolitan University. What should I do if I don't want to get a cold?
Stay away from people all the time.
Okay, not going to work for me. So let's just talk about the viruses that cause the common call. Just give me the basics. What do we know about these viruses.
They're parasites and they're not cells. They're neither dead nor alive. They're really really small, So even for a virus, that's right, Even for a virus, if we stick to rhinovirus here, those are about thirty nanometers in diameter. If you look at a clenched fist, a normal sized clenched fist, the virus about a million times smaller than that. There's lots of those viral particles that are then delivered to the correct area, which is your nose. Those viral particles will
then attach to the surface of the cells. Now, the surface of cells is quite a sugary, sticky, gluggy mess, and those viral particles will latch on to really specific parts that project from those cells. It'll kind of be swallowed into the cell and that's what the virus.
Wants to happen. Okay, so called virus, a rhinovirus. It comes into my nose, It latches onto some cells up in my nose, perfect fit.
What happens next, It's basically the membrane of the cell kind of folds in on itself and it drags the virus in with it, and then the genome can then start doing what it does, and that's basically making copies of itself and copies of new virus particles.
And specifically, it's hijacking my nose cells to make copies of the virus.
Absolutely right, that's what it does. Yes, So why do.
I feel like ass when that happens to me?
Well, it takes a few days. This period it'd often referred to as an incubation period, where there's a little bit of time in between the infection first taking place and noticing actual symptoms. That's because the cell is taken
over or hijacked by the virus. That's a trigger to the cell that there's something wrong, and when that cell then starts releasing molecule saying oh, look, something's gone wrong with me, I'll produce this molecule that will tell other components of the body, including the immune system, that there's something seriously wrong with this cell. Those are then the symptoms that you start to feel. So the symptoms are our immune system trying to fix what's happened in that cell is infected.
So in a sense, it's not the virus making me feel sick. It's my body fighting the virus that's making.
This absolutely correct, And if you think about it from the point of view of the virus, it doesn't want to make you sick. You are the host, and the virus is a parasite and without a host it can't reproduce, so the virus doesn't want to cause damage to the host.
But there is some collateral damage, if you like. And the best viruses have evolved over a long period of time to make those symptoms appear almost like nothing, so that the host isn't really aware of it, and the virus is quite happily reproducing, and the host is quite happily a host for the viral particles. Everybody wins. Everybody wins.
Yeah, what's the end of the story. So the body is attacking the virus, and it makes me have a running nose and a headache, and it makes me feel tired, And then after a week I feel fine.
Why the virus by then has made enough copies of itself. It's done what it had to do in that particular host. The job now is to find the next nose. It needs to get out of there and find another nose to make more copies. Whenever you sneeze or cough, when you're feeling ill and you've got a cold, that's a beautiful way of releasing those viral particles out into the atmosphere, out onto surfaces that then another host can then pick up.
So I want to do a sort of lightening round to ask you, is there good evidence that any of the following things will help me recover from a cold more quickly? Sure?
Zinc some evidence, vitamin C some evidence, rest good evidence, drink lots of fluids good evidence, really good.
Evidence that those things will make me get better faster.
It'll make your body feel better.
Interesting. I'm surprised that there is some evidence for zinc and vitamin C, to tell you the truth, my understanding was that there was not. So tell me why I'm wrong. That's interesting.
Well, the common cold unit did produce some zinc particles which did show some effect in laboratory style tests that it was efficient at reducing some of the symptoms of common cold.
You take zinc when you get a cold?
No, I don't.
What do you do?
I rest, I drink lots of water, but I don't take any over the counter medications. Vitamin C, I would recommend. Vitamin C is an antioxidant, so it is a lot of good properties that can help your immune system and help deal with the toxins. And it's not targeting the virus. It's just targeting the symptoms that appear and anything that can kind of reduce though those symptoms somewhat, I would argue is a good thing, but it's not really a cure.
It's just palliative treating what you see in front of you.
Okay, So we know that there is this incredible diversity of viruses that cause colds. Is that basically why I keep getting callds? Because every time I get sick, my body fights off some cold virus, then I get infected with some other cold virus.
Exactly right. If you think about it as an adult, we get on average two to three colds a year. We know there's approximating two hundred and fifty to three hundred different types of virus that can cause common colds, and so what that basically means is that immunity to the first virus you get doesn't protect you against the other two hundred and eighty different versions of those viruses. So yes, you may accumulate some immunity along the way, but it's not helping you again any of the others,
only against that one version of the virus. So unfortunately they're too fast and too clever for us.
You mentioned among the kinds of viruses that cause CALLDS coronaviruses, and I had read that one of the coronaviruses that causes you know, a mild called now is thought to have caused a horrible global pandemic long ago, hundreds of years ago or a thousand years ago. Is that right?
Well, we know with the coronaviruses that because it's an RNA genome and it's mutating and changing every time it reproduces, it drifts that it slowly accumulates mutations that change it. So I think it's a combination of things. The virus is changing with each step that it makes with each new hosts that it infects, and eventually those changes will
give the virus an opportunity. It gives it an advantage over a previous version, and that advantage often is to cause less damaging symptoms to the host.
So can we hope that, I mean, is it the case that, in I don't know what one hundred years, COVID will be a culled I.
Would fully expect COVID to become less dangerous in terms of symptoms and causing death.
You've been studying viruses for a long time, and I'm curious what have you learned about viruses.
I've learned they're very, very clever. They're very simple, but they are just so exquisites in what they do and their ability to change, adapt, move on to new hosts, move on to new species. It's phenomenal. And our immune system, by the way, is pretty clever as well. It's amazing, but it's always a step behind. We're always playing a little bit of catch up when it comes to viruses.
They appear we've got no immunity, and then slowly we get used to the virus and then we can happily coexist with those viruses, so we're stuck with viruses forever, I'm afraid.
Thanks to my guest today, Gary MacLean and Katie David. Next week we'll be talking about influenza. The flu seals off the coast of Maine are getting a nasty strain of flu, which is a big warning sign for humans everywhere.
Well, with any sort of viral threat that's getting into humans periodically, dramatically, murderously, it's important to know how how is that getting into humans so we can prevent them from getting into us.
Incubation is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia. It's produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, Ariela Markowitz, and Amy Gaines McQuaid. Our editors are Julia Barton and Karen Schakerjee mastering by Anne Pope, fact checking by Joseph Friedman. Our executive producers are Katherine Girardeau and Matt Romano. I'm Jacob Goldstein. Thanks for listening.