September 28, 2023 • 29 mins
What do we know – and not know – about the suite of viral infections known as “the common cold”? We speak with curator Katie Dabin about the UK’s Common Cold Unit, where volunteers signed up over the course of decades to get infected with colds. Then we enlist top virologist Gary McLean for some advice on what we can do to help ourselves feel better.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
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
(00:57):
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
(01:21):
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,
(01:46):
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
(02:07):
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
(02:30):
tissues and other artifacts from the CCU.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
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
(02:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
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
(03:54):
to come by to do this type of research. So
what's definitely the next best thing are human volunteers, So
human guinea peas.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I thinks we're basically not we don't have enough of
a research culture to do chimpanzees, but we.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
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
(04:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Why set up a whole unit just to study the
common cold?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
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
(05:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Right, maybe we could find a vaccine so everybody, every
when your baby you get a shot, you never have
to get a called.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Amazing, absolutely and who wouldn't take that option if you could?
Speaker 1 (05:55):
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?
Speaker 3 (06:07):
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
(06:28):
the cold, does getting a chill cause the cold? You know,
there were lots of really important questions to explore.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
So we got the questions we got the place. The
Common Cold unit is open. How does it work?
Speaker 3 (06:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
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
(07:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
How are you infected with someone else's nasal washings? What
does that actually mean?
Speaker 3 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Basically for a lot of people that the scientists.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
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
(08:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
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
(09:43):
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
(10:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
A cold, according to the Common Cold Unit studies at
that point in time.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
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?
Speaker 3 (11:28):
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
(11:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Big deal, right, And I understand that the discovery of
coronavirus in particular is actually it's actually kind of an
interesting story, right.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
And essentially every parent knows that.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
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
(12:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
To be clear, he knows that it's causing the cold,
but he can't throw it. He can't see it.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
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
(13:27):
a medical career.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
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
(14:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
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
(14:51):
images that she and David and a couple of other
virologists agreed on calling this new type of virus they
identified coronavirus.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
That, yes, she was absolutely the first person to see that.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Why does it end up being a big deal that
they discovered the coronavirus?
Speaker 3 (15:19):
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
(15:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
So what is the end of the story of the
Common Cold Unit.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, hugely like genomics and like it.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
It seems kind of anachronistic by that point, right.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
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
(16:51):
of slightly anachronistic research model in that way.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
So when we zoom out and think about this interesting place,
what should we make of it?
Speaker 3 (17:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
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
(18:09):
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.
(18:31):
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
(18:52):
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?
Speaker 4 (19:01):
Stay away from people all the time.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
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
(19:36):
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
(20:02):
parts that project from those cells. It'll kind of be
swallowed into the cell and that's what the virus.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
And specifically, it's hijacking my nose cells to make copies
of the virus.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Absolutely right, that's what it does. Yes, So why do.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
I feel like ass when that happens to me?
Speaker 4 (20:53):
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
(21:14):
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
(21:36):
symptoms that you start to feel. So the symptoms are
our immune system trying to fix what's happened in that
cell is infected.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
So in a sense, it's not the virus making me
feel sick. It's my body fighting the virus that's making.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
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
(22:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
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
(23:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
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?
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Zinc some evidence, vitamin C some evidence, rest good evidence,
drink lots of fluids good evidence, really good.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Evidence that those things will make me get better faster.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
It'll make your body feel better.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
You take zinc when you get a cold?
Speaker 4 (24:26):
No, I don't.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
What do you do?
Speaker 4 (24:29):
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.
(24:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
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
(25:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
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?
Speaker 4 (26:29):
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
(26:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
Would fully expect COVID to become less dangerous in terms
of symptoms and causing death.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
You've been studying viruses for a long time, and I'm
curious what have you learned about viruses.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
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,
(27:59):
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,
(28:23):
I'm afraid.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
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
(29:24):
Jacob Goldstein. Thanks for listening.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
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
(00:57):
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
(01:21):
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,
(01:46):
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
(02:07):
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
(02:30):
tissues and other artifacts from the CCU.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
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
(02:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
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
(03:54):
to come by to do this type of research. So
what's definitely the next best thing are human volunteers, So
human guinea peas.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I thinks we're basically not we don't have enough of
a research culture to do chimpanzees, but we.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
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
(04:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Why set up a whole unit just to study the
common cold?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
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
(05:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Right, maybe we could find a vaccine so everybody, every
when your baby you get a shot, you never have
to get a called.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Amazing, absolutely and who wouldn't take that option if you could?
Speaker 1 (05:55):
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?
Speaker 3 (06:07):
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
(06:28):
the cold, does getting a chill cause the cold? You know,
there were lots of really important questions to explore.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
So we got the questions we got the place. The
Common Cold unit is open. How does it work?
Speaker 3 (06:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
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
(07:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
How are you infected with someone else's nasal washings? What
does that actually mean?
Speaker 3 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Basically for a lot of people that the scientists.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
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
(08:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
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
(09:43):
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
(10:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
A cold, according to the Common Cold Unit studies at
that point in time.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
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?
Speaker 3 (11:28):
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
(11:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Big deal, right, And I understand that the discovery of
coronavirus in particular is actually it's actually kind of an
interesting story, right.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
And essentially every parent knows that.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
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
(12:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
To be clear, he knows that it's causing the cold,
but he can't throw it. He can't see it.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
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
(13:27):
a medical career.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
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
(14:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
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
(14:51):
images that she and David and a couple of other
virologists agreed on calling this new type of virus they
identified coronavirus.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
That, yes, she was absolutely the first person to see that.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Why does it end up being a big deal that
they discovered the coronavirus?
Speaker 3 (15:19):
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
(15:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
So what is the end of the story of the
Common Cold Unit.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, hugely like genomics and like it.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
It seems kind of anachronistic by that point, right.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
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
(16:51):
of slightly anachronistic research model in that way.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
So when we zoom out and think about this interesting place,
what should we make of it?
Speaker 3 (17:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
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
(18:09):
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.
(18:31):
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
(18:52):
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?
Speaker 4 (19:01):
Stay away from people all the time.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
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
(19:36):
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
(20:02):
parts that project from those cells. It'll kind of be
swallowed into the cell and that's what the virus.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
And specifically, it's hijacking my nose cells to make copies
of the virus.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Absolutely right, that's what it does. Yes, So why do.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
I feel like ass when that happens to me?
Speaker 4 (20:53):
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
(21:14):
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
(21:36):
symptoms that you start to feel. So the symptoms are
our immune system trying to fix what's happened in that
cell is infected.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
So in a sense, it's not the virus making me
feel sick. It's my body fighting the virus that's making.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
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
(22:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
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
(23:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
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?
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Zinc some evidence, vitamin C some evidence, rest good evidence,
drink lots of fluids good evidence, really good.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Evidence that those things will make me get better faster.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
It'll make your body feel better.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
You take zinc when you get a cold?
Speaker 4 (24:26):
No, I don't.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
What do you do?
Speaker 4 (24:29):
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.
(24:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
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
(25:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
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?
Speaker 4 (26:29):
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
(26:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
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.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
Would fully expect COVID to become less dangerous in terms
of symptoms and causing death.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
You've been studying viruses for a long time, and I'm
curious what have you learned about viruses.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
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,
(27:59):
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,
(28:23):
I'm afraid.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
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
(29:24):
Jacob Goldstein. Thanks for listening.
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