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The Common Coldthe Medical Research Council's early work on cold viruses in the UKDr Christopher Andrewes was the driving force behind the Medical Research Council's Common Cold Unit, which was set up in Wiltshire, England, after the Second World War.
Common Cold UnitThe Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Common Cold Unit (CCU), set in the rolling countryside around Salisbury, Wiltshire, was founded in 1946. From the first trial, which began in July of that year, until the Unit’s closure in 1990, an estimated 20,000 volunteers enrolled to help determine the rôle played by viruses in the common cold. OriginsWithin days of the outbreak of the Second World War, Dr James B. Conant, president of Harvard University, offered medical help to the British. In Whitehall, the Ministry of Health, concerned that large population movements, combined with crowding in air-raid shelters would lead to a sharp rise in communicable diseases, gratefully accepted the American offer. Following consultation, a site was located at Harnham Hill on the outskirts of Salisbury, and in September 1941 the American Red Cross – Harvard Hospital was opened. Dr Christopher AndrewesAfter the war the Americans gifted the hospital to the British, and the CCU was founded there the following year, due primarily to the persistence of Dr (later Sir) Christopher Andrewes of the MRC’s National Institute for Medical Reserach (NIMR), London. In 1931, while in New York, he had visited the Rockefeller Institute and met Alphonse Dochez who was developing a virus theory of the common cold. Andrewes saw Dochez inoculating young chimpanzees and human volunteers with bacteria-free filtrates of nasal secretions from cold sufferers. The chimps and humans developed colds, thus establishing that these infections were due primarily to filterable bacteria, i.e. viruses. VolunteersBack in England, Andrewes attempted to extend Dochez’s observations, but chimps were in short supply, so he addressed a meeting of medical students at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. ‘We cannot get hold of any chimpanzees,’ he said, ‘and the next best thing to a chimpanzee is a Bart’s student.’ He got his volunteers, but the MRC terminated his project in 1932, and it would be 1946 before concerted research on the common cold could resume. InfluenzaMeanwhile Andrewes had turned his attention to influenza, and in 1933, along with Wilson Smith and Patrick Laidlaw, became the first to grow human influenza virus by intranasal inoculation of ferrets. TrialsEarly trials at the CCU were aimed not only at defining the pattern of disease produced by infection with various viruses, but also to disprove some ill-founded claims. For example, many believed that colds occurred when the body was chilled and/or wet. Sir Christopher sought to test this by sending volunteers out to walk in heavy downpours. On returning, they discovered that he had switched the heating off. Awash with rain, they were encouraged to stand around in draughty corridors wearing bathing costumes. They failed to develop colds. Today, the sole memorial to the CCU, its former site now a housing development, is a small plaque at its entrance on the Blandford Road.
The copyright of the article The Common Cold in Diseases/Viruses is owned by George Frederick Winter. Permission to republish The Common Cold in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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