Speaker 1: It starts with a little bit of a sore throat,
Speaker 1: then a runny nose, headache, you feel tired all day,
Speaker 1: You got a cold. Cold viruses infect most of us
Speaker 1: on average two or three times a year, and we
Speaker 1: just accept colds as a fact of life. But what
Speaker 1: if we didn't have to.
Speaker 2: A Ministry of Health research unit at Harvard Hospital Salisbury
Speaker 2: has been investigating the common code and volunteers human guinea
Speaker 2: pigs have been living there in pairs for ten days
Speaker 2: at the time.
Speaker 1: That's an old movie tone newsreel, and it's about the
Speaker 1: Common Cold Unit. The Common Cold Unit or CCU was
Speaker 1: a scientific institution that opened in the UK in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty six, and for decades, volunteers went there in order
Speaker 1: to be infected with the common cold. Then researchers would
Speaker 1: study what happened next. Their ultimate goal was to figure
Speaker 1: out which virus or viruses caused colds and whether science
Speaker 1: could finally make the common cold disappear for good. The
Speaker 1: Common Cold Unit became pretty famous in its day. Volunteers
Speaker 1: went back a year after year. Some of them even
Speaker 1: fell in love there, got married, and more than a
Speaker 1: few famous scientists started their careers spraying cold viruses up
Speaker 1: people's noses. In the end, the CCU failed to achieve
Speaker 1: its main goal. It did not produce a cure for
Speaker 1: or a vaccine to prevent the common cold, but it
Speaker 1: did lay the groundwork for a lot of what we
Speaker 1: know today about viruses, and the stories of what scientists
Speaker 1: learned at the Common Cold Unit and how they learned
Speaker 1: it are amazing and delightful. Snotty tissues may never again
Speaker 1: play such a pivotal role in scientific research. I'm Jacob Goldstein,
Speaker 1: and you're listening to Incubation, a show about all the
Speaker 1: other viruses. In previous episodes, we found out how science
Speaker 1: progressed from Edward Jenner's early work on smallpox to the
Speaker 1: development of the polio vaccine to the twenty first century
Speaker 1: design of a vaccine for RSV. But even after all
Speaker 1: this progress, we're still missing some simple answers. Today we're
Speaker 1: going deep on the common cold. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: about what we know and what we don't know about
Speaker 1: the many viruses that cause it. A lot of what
Speaker 1: we do know comes from research on human volunteers in
Speaker 1: the UK who went to the Common Cold Unit and
Speaker 1: signed up to get sick. Our first guest today is
Speaker 1: Katie David. She's a curator at the Science Museum in
Speaker 1: London and she oversees a collection that includes vintage snotty
Speaker 1: tissues and other artifacts from the CCU.
Speaker 3: I've worked at the Science Museum for quite a few
Speaker 3: years and the first time I encountered the Common Cold
Speaker 3: Unit was about ten years ago. And we've got this
Speaker 3: amazingly large object store in West London, and you see
Speaker 3: all sorts of weird and wonderful things. But I was
Speaker 3: in one room and I could see this like really
Speaker 3: flowery armchair and it just sort of struck me as
Speaker 3: so strange. You know, it's not an X ray machine,
Speaker 3: it's not a stethoscope. I sort of did a bit
Speaker 3: of digging and basically it was an armchair from the
Speaker 3: Common Cold Unit. It was part of the volunteers, the
Speaker 3: kind of furniture they would have sat on and there
Speaker 3: that's how I first discovered this weird and wonderful place
Speaker 3: called the Common Cold You know.
Speaker 1: It plays so amazing then even just a cheer from
Speaker 1: there belongs in a museum. Absolutely, it's okay. The Common
Speaker 1: Cold Unit was set up in this basically this abandoned
Speaker 1: hospital in the British countryside right after World War Two?
Speaker 1: How does this happen? Like, what's the story there.
Speaker 3: There's a British virologist called Christopher Andrews, and he has
Speaker 3: been over to the States and seen this amazing research
Speaker 3: with American scientists who are using chimpanzee models, which appear
Speaker 3: to be the only animal model at that point where
Speaker 3: you could transmit the common cold and start investigating it.
Speaker 3: But you know, Britain, post war, chimpanzees are not easy
Speaker 3: to come by to do this type of research. So
Speaker 3: what's definitely the next best thing are human volunteers, So
Speaker 3: human guinea peas.
Speaker 1: I thinks we're basically not we don't have enough of
Speaker 1: a research culture to do chimpanzees, but we.
Speaker 3: Don't have people, well we have people, we have medical students,
Speaker 3: which are definitely know one of the next best things.
Speaker 3: And so he sort of is aware of this, you know,
Speaker 3: infectious disease hospital, and it's so isolated that he sees
Speaker 3: it as an opportunity that actually you can start carrying
Speaker 3: out these volunteer medical studies into the common cold. So
Speaker 3: in July nineteen forty six, so just a few months
Speaker 3: after this site gets set up, they're welcoming their first
Speaker 3: volunteers to be infected with the common cold and to
Speaker 3: see if they could transmit it.
Speaker 1: Why set up a whole unit just to study the
Speaker 1: common cold?
Speaker 3: I mean, the common cold just seems I mean, it
Speaker 3: almost seems relatively trivial to us today. But it's not
Speaker 3: that long after the Spanish influenza epidemic, so there's a
Speaker 3: lot of research into influenza and the cold and viruses
Speaker 3: and bacteria in general. In the nineteen thirties, you know,
Speaker 3: coming out of the war, there's a real need to
Speaker 3: rebuild Britain and Europe, and there's real worries about productivity
Speaker 3: in Britain, like so many people are taking sick days,
Speaker 3: they're going absent from work, and actually, is there a
Speaker 3: really easy way we could solve what was causing the
Speaker 3: common cold, find a cure and encourage more people to
Speaker 3: stay healthy and not seek how expensive medical visits to
Speaker 3: doctors at the time.
Speaker 1: And there is this real problem every year everybody is,
Speaker 1: you know, missing a week of work because they're sick
Speaker 1: with the cold. If we could fix that, is this
Speaker 1: moment of faith in science and progress, right, If we
Speaker 1: could find a cure for the common cold. That would
Speaker 1: be a huge boon to productivity.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I mean there's this real spirit of trying to
Speaker 3: solve these issues. You know that they're identifying influenza, that
Speaker 3: were coming up with new vaccines for lots of conditions.
Speaker 1: Right, maybe we could find a vaccine so everybody, every
Speaker 1: when your baby you get a shot, you never have
Speaker 1: to get a called.
Speaker 3: Amazing, absolutely and who wouldn't take that option if you could?
Speaker 1: I would take it now in a heartbeat. So what
Speaker 1: did scientists know? How did you know humanity know about
Speaker 1: the common cold at this time in nineteen forty six?
Speaker 1: Do we know it was virus? Do we know which virus?
Speaker 3: So really little. There was definitely inklings that it was
Speaker 3: some form of virus, but very little known about it
Speaker 3: at all. It was very much this open question to
Speaker 3: understand what was causing the common cold? Was the one cause, worsler,
Speaker 3: multiple causes? How is it being transmitted? They were also
Speaker 3: interested in like in terms of causes, like common myths
Speaker 3: and things. If you stand out in the rain and
Speaker 3: the cold, does getting a chill cause the cold? You know,
Speaker 3: there were lots of really important questions to explore.
Speaker 1: So we got the questions we got the place. The
Speaker 1: Common Cold unit is open. How does it work?
Speaker 3: So the research team advertised for volunteers. They send out
Speaker 3: adverts into local newspapers to say things like ten day
Speaker 3: free break in the autumn and winter. You might not
Speaker 3: win a Nobel prize, but you will help find a
Speaker 3: cure for the common cold.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: The trials sort of lasted for around by two weeks,
Speaker 3: and they take thirty volunteers would be split into two
Speaker 3: groups and they would live in these little huts on site.
Speaker 3: So married couples could stay in the same little volunteer flat,
Speaker 3: but unmarried couples absolutely, you know, prohibited. And really as
Speaker 3: a volunteer, this was like an amazing opportunity to almost
Speaker 3: have a lovely holiday stay, a relaxing stay. You would
Speaker 3: be paid a very small amount of money about one
Speaker 3: pounds seventy five a week or something like that. You'd
Speaker 3: have your travel expenses paid, but then you'd get three
Speaker 3: meals a day. It was very relaxing. You know, you
Speaker 3: could read, you could study, you could go for walks
Speaker 3: on the countryside.
Speaker 1: And let's be clear, you know, post war Britain is
Speaker 1: a tough place economically. I mean Britain won the war,
Speaker 1: but it got destroyed absolutely.
Speaker 3: I mean, rationing doesn't end. So like the mid nineteen fifties,
Speaker 3: people really want to volunteer and help Britain and you know,
Speaker 3: it really feels like they're doing something something good.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this, Okay, So that's the fun side.
Speaker 1: You get three meals in your tocula country. What do
Speaker 1: you got to do? What do you got to do?
Speaker 1: If you're a volunteer there.
Speaker 3: You turn up, Say, if you turn up on a Wednesday,
Speaker 3: you'd first have to quarantine for three days to make
Speaker 3: sure that you weren't infectious with you know, a cold already.
Speaker 3: So assuming after those three days you were fine and well,
Speaker 3: you would then be infected with somebody else's nasal washings.
Speaker 1: How are you infected with someone else's nasal washings? What
Speaker 1: does that actually mean?
Speaker 3: So often it would be like just through nose swabs,
Speaker 3: but sometimes it was sprayed. They'd be inventing all sorts
Speaker 3: of crazy apparatus to replicate a sneez droplets and things
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 1: Basically for a lot of people that the scientists.
Speaker 3: Give you a cold, yeah, absolutely, and then for the
Speaker 3: next week you're just observed. And so some people after
Speaker 3: a couple of days would develop a cold, and the
Speaker 3: researchers would collect all their snotty tissues and try and
Speaker 3: incubate and analyze what the material in those snotty tissues,
Speaker 3: and then other people never developed anything and had a
Speaker 3: very thoroughly pleasant stay. I mean really only about a
Speaker 3: third of the volunteers would ever get a cold, so
Speaker 3: actually you had a pretty good chance not getting one
Speaker 3: at all during the process, and after about ten days
Speaker 3: you were released back to your regular life.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about they had this goal of minding a
Speaker 1: cure or a vaccine. They thought they might do it
Speaker 1: in a few years. Spoiler alert they didn't. But let's
Speaker 1: talk about some of the work that they did there.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about this not experiment.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the amazing things is like actually quite
Speaker 3: a few famous or sort of really important people worked
Speaker 3: at the Common Cold Unit, and one of them was
Speaker 3: James Lovelock, British scientist, and in his early research he
Speaker 3: was an incredible engineer. He could come up with amazing
Speaker 3: solutions to shricky experimental problems, and he invented this nasal
Speaker 3: dropper system. So if you imagine like a thin tube
Speaker 3: strapped your nose that would drop a solution that contained
Speaker 3: a fluorescent dye within it. It was sort of they're
Speaker 3: simulating a drippy nose essentially. And then the experiment was
Speaker 3: to simulate, you know, just like a normal everyday activity.
Speaker 3: The participants were playing cards, we're making cups of tea,
Speaker 3: just hanging out for the evening. And at the end
Speaker 3: of you know, a few hours of just normal at
Speaker 3: day to day interaction, they turn off the lights and
Speaker 3: put the fluorescent lamp on and they could see the
Speaker 3: traces of how this sort of fluorescent die had been
Speaker 3: transmitted all across different surfaces, across the playing cars, cups, cups, kitchen.
Speaker 3: It really revealed that act of transmission, that transmission. It
Speaker 3: wasn't just sort of through inhalation alone.
Speaker 1: It's through we're all disgusting and we all get our
Speaker 1: snot over each other all the time. Basically, you mentioned
Speaker 1: that at the Common Cold Unity they studied whether being
Speaker 1: cold makes you catch cold. Was there a particular study
Speaker 1: you were referring to.
Speaker 3: They had participants who stood outside in the cold and
Speaker 3: the wet yet to test this theory about whether that
Speaker 3: made them more predisposed to developing The Common Colder and
Speaker 3: apparently they disprove that.
Speaker 1: So, just to be clear, standing out in the cold
Speaker 1: does not make you more like to get a cald.
Speaker 1: Just for my mother and for everybody's mother, being cold
Speaker 1: does not make you catch.
Speaker 3: A cold, according to the Common Cold Unit studies at
Speaker 3: that point in time.
Speaker 1: Yes, my mother is a physician, by the way, I
Speaker 1: feel guilty saying that because she knows, but she still
Speaker 1: always wanted me to bring a cod So we know
Speaker 1: they didn't find a cure or a vaccine for the cold,
Speaker 1: or if they did, they didn't tell anybody because we
Speaker 1: don't have one. But what did they figure out?
Speaker 3: So people have construed the Common Cold Unit as a failure,
Speaker 3: like a research failure, but over its sort of forty
Speaker 3: odd years, the unit produced over one thousand research papers.
Speaker 3: And they started off in these early days trying to
Speaker 3: find ways to grow the common cold viruses in laboratory cultures.
Speaker 3: So they worked that out. They revealed lots of insights
Speaker 3: around transmission. But really what they did that was exciting
Speaker 3: is that they discovered rhina viruses and coronaviruses through all
Speaker 3: the sort of volunteer nasal snots collecting they were doing
Speaker 3: in analysis so this is a.
Speaker 1: Big deal, right, And I understand that the discovery of
Speaker 1: coronavirus in particular is actually it's actually kind of an
Speaker 1: interesting story, right.
Speaker 3: So there was an amazing researcher virologist called David Tyrrell
Speaker 3: who started off in nineteen fifty seven as a researcher
Speaker 3: at the Common Cold Unit, and he's doing really interesting experiments.
Speaker 3: We all know school kids are such a reservoir of colds.
Speaker 1: And essentially every parent knows that.
Speaker 3: Yes, every parent knows that. So they invited school groups
Speaker 3: to have parties at the Comic Cold Center and again
Speaker 3: would collect nasal specimens from particularly snutting school kids. And
Speaker 3: after one of the samples from I think about a
Speaker 3: twelve year old schoolboy in nineteen sixty, David Terrell was
Speaker 3: researching this specimen and after sort of conducting lots of
Speaker 3: different experiments trying to identify what type of virus it was,
Speaker 3: it just didn't match to anything he already knew that existed.
Speaker 3: And so by about nineteen sixty five he publishes his
Speaker 3: first paper saying, oh, I've identified this unknown virus.
Speaker 1: To be clear, he knows that it's causing the cold,
Speaker 1: but he can't throw it. He can't see it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, so he can't see it's but then he's
Speaker 3: put in contact with this amazing virologist called June Al Misa.
Speaker 3: She was born in Glasgow, lived in Glasgow tenements. Her
Speaker 3: dad was a bus driver. As a young girl, her
Speaker 3: six year old brother died of dip theory, so you know,
Speaker 3: she's got really close contact with infectious disease and that
Speaker 3: sort of inspired her to want to get involved in
Speaker 3: a medical career.
Speaker 1: So I was reading about her when I was getting
Speaker 1: ready for this interview, and I understand that what she
Speaker 1: ends up doing is electron microscopy, which at the time
Speaker 1: it's this relatively new technology. Right, tell me more about that.
Speaker 3: She just develops this amazing ability to be able to
Speaker 3: take virus images. A lot of people describe it like
Speaker 3: gardening it. You know, there's still an art and a
Speaker 3: kind of being. It's like being green fingered. To get
Speaker 3: those images took a lot of preparation and she just
Speaker 3: was able to do it. She's taking ones of rubellah
Speaker 3: for the first time. That causes German Me and David
Speaker 3: Terrell from the Common Cold Unit becomes aware of these
Speaker 3: amazing images and her work using an electron microscope, and
Speaker 3: so he sends her a this sample of this schoolboy
Speaker 3: snotty tissue and this virus sample, and she's able to
Speaker 3: prepare it and start taking images, and so for the
Speaker 3: first time, she images the first ever coronavirus.
Speaker 1: So he sends her whatever snotty tissues, the samples from
Speaker 1: the schoolboy with the mystery virus. And what does she
Speaker 1: see when she looks at it.
Speaker 3: So nobody's visualized a coronavirus before, so she's looking at
Speaker 3: it for the first time using an electron microscope, and
Speaker 3: so she sees the slightly round virus particle. But what
Speaker 3: makes it really different looking is these little projections that
Speaker 3: come out of it, these little spiky projections. She described
Speaker 3: it as like a solar corona, so like the corona
Speaker 3: you get around the Sun. And it was through these
Speaker 3: images that she and David and a couple of other
Speaker 3: virologists agreed on calling this new type of virus they
Speaker 3: identified coronavirus.
Speaker 1: So that sort of stylized image that we all saw
Speaker 1: a million times over the past three years, of the
Speaker 1: little circle with the little lines the spikes coming out
Speaker 1: of it. She was the first one ever to see.
Speaker 3: That, yes, she was absolutely the first person to see that.
Speaker 1: Why does it end up being a big deal that
Speaker 1: they discovered the coronavirus?
Speaker 3: Obviously, imaging the coronavirus has become a much bigger deal
Speaker 3: since the pandemic is much more important to us now,
Speaker 3: But I think it's also important in terms of understanding
Speaker 3: the history of the common cold and the research and
Speaker 3: the unit as well. So many different viruses cause the
Speaker 3: common cold. There isn't one single cause, and so by
Speaker 3: understanding that there were rhina viruses and coronaviruses and all
Speaker 3: sorts of different viruses causing the cold, it just complicates
Speaker 3: the picture. It just sort of shows that it's really
Speaker 3: hard to cure the common cold.
Speaker 1: So what is the end of the story of the
Speaker 1: Common Cold Unit.
Speaker 3: It's incredible that the Common Cold Unit ran for over
Speaker 3: forty years, so eventually by nineteen eighty nine they welcome
Speaker 3: their last volunteers and essentially the Medical Research Council decide
Speaker 3: to stop funding the site of the Common Cold Unit.
Speaker 1: So it's amazing in a way that it's still going
Speaker 1: on in the eighties, maybe because I'm old enough to
Speaker 1: remember the eighties and it's like, sure, oh, the forties.
Speaker 1: This is some weird old timey thing from a long
Speaker 1: time before I was born, but that it was going
Speaker 1: on in the eighties when like you know whatever, there were.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hugely like genomics and like it.
Speaker 1: It seems kind of anachronistic by that point, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, the problem of the common cold unit, particularly
Speaker 3: it starts off being in such an isolated environment, which
Speaker 3: was such a great thing for this kind of isolating
Speaker 3: and quarantine study, but actually it was very isolated from
Speaker 3: the kind of developments within medical research at that time.
Speaker 3: I know, these amazing other research facilities being built, and
Speaker 3: so it did begin to be seen as this sort
Speaker 3: of slightly anachronistic research model in that way.
Speaker 1: So when we zoom out and think about this interesting place,
Speaker 1: what should we make of it?
Speaker 3: I mean, for me, I think it's a brilliant story
Speaker 3: of the willingness of people to volunteer and give their
Speaker 3: bodies and time to try and solve some medical challenge.
Speaker 3: And I think it just demonstrates that, you know, often
Speaker 3: we're after a quick fix, you know, we want things
Speaker 3: to be easily solved by a vaccine or a simple drug.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean, just how complex the common cold
Speaker 1: is seems like one of the one of the real
Speaker 1: discoveries of the Common Cold Unit. Anyway, it was great
Speaker 1: to talk with you. Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Alas, the Common Cold Unit did not in fact get
Speaker 1: rid of colds forever, but scientists still draw on that
Speaker 1: research to understand how virus is spread and how they
Speaker 1: work inside our bodies, how cold viruses make us feel sick,
Speaker 1: and what we can do to make ourselves feel better.
Speaker 1: That's when incubation returns. One of the things that those
Speaker 1: researchers in the UK discovered as they studied the common
Speaker 1: cold for decades, there is no single culprit. In fact,
Speaker 1: we now know that more than two hundred different viruses
Speaker 1: cause this group of symptoms that we lump under the
Speaker 1: term common cold. The biggest group of viruses is called
Speaker 1: rhinoviruses rhino from the Greek for nos like in rhinoceros.
Speaker 1: Scientists now believe that rhinoviruses cause somewhere around half of
Speaker 1: all colds. There is in fact a good chance that
Speaker 1: at this very minute I am fighting off a rhinovirus.
Speaker 1: So lucky me as host of this show, I get
Speaker 1: to call up a leading expert on rhinoviruses and ask
Speaker 1: him for some explanations, some advice. The expert's name is
Speaker 1: Gary MacLean and he's an emeritus professor at London Metropolitan University.
Speaker 1: What should I do if I don't want to get
Speaker 1: a cold?
Speaker 4: Stay away from people all the time.
Speaker 1: Okay, not going to work for me. So let's just
Speaker 1: talk about the viruses that cause the common call. Just
Speaker 1: give me the basics. What do we know about these viruses.
Speaker 4: They're parasites and they're not cells. They're neither dead nor alive.
Speaker 4: They're really really small, So even for a virus, that's right,
Speaker 4: Even for a virus, if we stick to rhinovirus here,
Speaker 4: those are about thirty nanometers in diameter. If you look
Speaker 4: at a clenched fist, a normal sized clenched fist, the
Speaker 4: virus about a million times smaller than that. There's lots
Speaker 4: of those viral particles that are then delivered to the
Speaker 4: correct area, which is your nose. Those viral particles will
Speaker 4: then attach to the surface of the cells. Now, the
Speaker 4: surface of cells is quite a sugary, sticky, gluggy mess,
Speaker 4: and those viral particles will latch on to really specific
Speaker 4: parts that project from those cells. It'll kind of be
Speaker 4: swallowed into the cell and that's what the virus.
Speaker 1: Wants to happen. Okay, so called virus, a rhinovirus. It
Speaker 1: comes into my nose, It latches onto some cells up
Speaker 1: in my nose, perfect fit.
Speaker 4: What happens next, It's basically the membrane of the cell
Speaker 4: kind of folds in on itself and it drags the
Speaker 4: virus in with it, and then the genome can then
Speaker 4: start doing what it does, and that's basically making copies
Speaker 4: of itself and copies of new virus particles.
Speaker 1: And specifically, it's hijacking my nose cells to make copies
Speaker 1: of the virus.
Speaker 4: Absolutely right, that's what it does. Yes, So why do.
Speaker 1: I feel like ass when that happens to me?
Speaker 4: Well, it takes a few days. This period it'd often
Speaker 4: referred to as an incubation period, where there's a little
Speaker 4: bit of time in between the infection first taking place
Speaker 4: and noticing actual symptoms. That's because the cell is taken
Speaker 4: over or hijacked by the virus. That's a trigger to
Speaker 4: the cell that there's something wrong, and when that cell
Speaker 4: then starts releasing molecule saying oh, look, something's gone wrong
Speaker 4: with me, I'll produce this molecule that will tell other
Speaker 4: components of the body, including the immune system, that there's
Speaker 4: something seriously wrong with this cell. Those are then the
Speaker 4: symptoms that you start to feel. So the symptoms are
Speaker 4: our immune system trying to fix what's happened in that
Speaker 4: cell is infected.
Speaker 1: So in a sense, it's not the virus making me
Speaker 1: feel sick. It's my body fighting the virus that's making.
Speaker 4: This absolutely correct, And if you think about it from
Speaker 4: the point of view of the virus, it doesn't want
Speaker 4: to make you sick. You are the host, and the
Speaker 4: virus is a parasite and without a host it can't reproduce,
Speaker 4: so the virus doesn't want to cause damage to the host.
Speaker 4: But there is some collateral damage, if you like. And
Speaker 4: the best viruses have evolved over a long period of
Speaker 4: time to make those symptoms appear almost like nothing, so
Speaker 4: that the host isn't really aware of it, and the
Speaker 4: virus is quite happily reproducing, and the host is quite
Speaker 4: happily a host for the viral particles. Everybody wins. Everybody wins.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's the end of the story. So the body
Speaker 1: is attacking the virus, and it makes me have a
Speaker 1: running nose and a headache, and it makes me feel tired,
Speaker 1: And then after a week I feel fine.
Speaker 4: Why the virus by then has made enough copies of itself.
Speaker 4: It's done what it had to do in that particular host.
Speaker 4: The job now is to find the next nose. It
Speaker 4: needs to get out of there and find another nose
Speaker 4: to make more copies. Whenever you sneeze or cough, when
Speaker 4: you're feeling ill and you've got a cold, that's a
Speaker 4: beautiful way of releasing those viral particles out into the atmosphere,
Speaker 4: out onto surfaces that then another host can then pick up.
Speaker 1: So I want to do a sort of lightening round
Speaker 1: to ask you, is there good evidence that any of
Speaker 1: the following things will help me recover from a cold
Speaker 1: more quickly? Sure?
Speaker 4: Zinc some evidence, vitamin C some evidence, rest good evidence,
Speaker 4: drink lots of fluids good evidence, really good.
Speaker 1: Evidence that those things will make me get better faster.
Speaker 4: It'll make your body feel better.
Speaker 1: Interesting. I'm surprised that there is some evidence for zinc
Speaker 1: and vitamin C, to tell you the truth, my understanding
Speaker 1: was that there was not. So tell me why I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 4: Well, the common cold unit did produce some zinc particles
Speaker 4: which did show some effect in laboratory style tests that
Speaker 4: it was efficient at reducing some of the symptoms of
Speaker 4: common cold.
Speaker 1: You take zinc when you get a cold?
Speaker 4: No, I don't.
Speaker 1: What do you do?
Speaker 4: I rest, I drink lots of water, but I don't
Speaker 4: take any over the counter medications. Vitamin C, I would recommend.
Speaker 4: Vitamin C is an antioxidant, so it is a lot
Speaker 4: of good properties that can help your immune system and
Speaker 4: help deal with the toxins. And it's not targeting the virus.
Speaker 4: It's just targeting the symptoms that appear and anything that
Speaker 4: can kind of reduce though those symptoms somewhat, I would
Speaker 4: argue is a good thing, but it's not really a cure.
Speaker 4: It's just palliative treating what you see in front of you.
Speaker 1: Okay, So we know that there is this incredible diversity
Speaker 1: of viruses that cause colds. Is that basically why I
Speaker 1: keep getting callds? Because every time I get sick, my
Speaker 1: body fights off some cold virus, then I get infected
Speaker 1: with some other cold virus.
Speaker 4: Exactly right. If you think about it as an adult,
Speaker 4: we get on average two to three colds a year.
Speaker 4: We know there's approximating two hundred and fifty to three
Speaker 4: hundred different types of virus that can cause common colds,
Speaker 4: and so what that basically means is that immunity to
Speaker 4: the first virus you get doesn't protect you against the
Speaker 4: other two hundred and eighty different versions of those viruses.
Speaker 4: So yes, you may accumulate some immunity along the way,
Speaker 4: but it's not helping you again any of the others,
Speaker 4: only against that one version of the virus. So unfortunately
Speaker 4: they're too fast and too clever for us.
Speaker 1: You mentioned among the kinds of viruses that cause CALLDS coronaviruses,
Speaker 1: and I had read that one of the coronaviruses that
Speaker 1: causes you know, a mild called now is thought to
Speaker 1: have caused a horrible global pandemic long ago, hundreds of
Speaker 1: years ago or a thousand years ago. Is that right?
Speaker 4: Well, we know with the coronaviruses that because it's an
Speaker 4: RNA genome and it's mutating and changing every time it reproduces,
Speaker 4: it drifts that it slowly accumulates mutations that change it.
Speaker 4: So I think it's a combination of things. The virus
Speaker 4: is changing with each step that it makes with each
Speaker 4: new hosts that it infects, and eventually those changes will
Speaker 4: give the virus an opportunity. It gives it an advantage
Speaker 4: over a previous version, and that advantage often is to
Speaker 4: cause less damaging symptoms to the host.
Speaker 1: So can we hope that, I mean, is it the
Speaker 1: case that, in I don't know what one hundred years,
Speaker 1: COVID will be a culled I.
Speaker 4: Would fully expect COVID to become less dangerous in terms
Speaker 4: of symptoms and causing death.
Speaker 1: You've been studying viruses for a long time, and I'm
Speaker 1: curious what have you learned about viruses.
Speaker 4: I've learned they're very, very clever. They're very simple, but
Speaker 4: they are just so exquisites in what they do and
Speaker 4: their ability to change, adapt, move on to new hosts,
Speaker 4: move on to new species. It's phenomenal. And our immune system,
Speaker 4: by the way, is pretty clever as well. It's amazing,
Speaker 4: but it's always a step behind. We're always playing a
Speaker 4: little bit of catch up when it comes to viruses.
Speaker 4: They appear we've got no immunity, and then slowly we
Speaker 4: get used to the virus and then we can happily
Speaker 4: coexist with those viruses, so we're stuck with viruses forever,
Speaker 4: I'm afraid.
Speaker 1: Thanks to my guest today, Gary MacLean and Katie David.
Speaker 1: Next week we'll be talking about influenza. The flu seals
Speaker 1: off the coast of Maine are getting a nasty strain
Speaker 1: of flu, which is a big warning sign for humans everywhere.
Speaker 5: Well, with any sort of viral threat that's getting into
Speaker 5: humans periodically, dramatically, murderously, it's important to know how how
Speaker 5: is that getting into humans so we can prevent them
Speaker 5: from getting into us.
Speaker 1: Incubation is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby
Speaker 1: Studio at iHeartMedia. It's produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, Ariela Markowitz,
Speaker 1: and Amy Gaines McQuaid. Our editors are Julia Barton and
Speaker 1: Karen Schakerjee mastering by Anne Pope, fact checking by Joseph Friedman.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Katherine Girardeau and Matt Romano. I'm
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein. Thanks for listening.