Medicine: V14A

The organism that causes one type of common cold has been isolated. So reported the U.S. Public Health Service’s Dr. Norman H. Topping and his assistant, Dr. Leon T. Atlas, in last week’s issue of Science.

In their search for the organism that British scientists hunted in vain for 18 months (TIME, Dec. 22), Drs. Topping and Atlas first used sterile skimmed milk to wash the nose of a man just catching cold. The solution was sprayed into the noses of volunteers (inmates of the District of Columbia’s Lorton Reformatory, who were paid $3 a week). They caught cold, too. Washings were then transplanted into chick embryos; solutions from the eggs produced the same thick “sinusitis-like” colds in other volunteers. All told, 57 of 60 human guinea pigs came down with colds.

Under the electron microscope, the cold-causing agent appeared to be “characteristic particles … of the same general size as viruses of the influenza type, but . . . readily distinguishable from them.” The two physicians named the “germ” .V14A because it came from the first nasal washing of the 14th volunteer.

It is still too early to talk about curing or preventing colds—even the type of common cold caused by V14A. Dr. Topping (who developed the first effective serum for Rocky Mountain spotted fever in 1940) would say only that a vaccine is “a possibility, not a probability.” (It took ten years to develop a flu vaccine after the flu virus was isolated in 1933.) As a final gloomy thought, Dr. Topping feared that even if a vaccine is developed, it will give immunity for only a very short time, and, of course, against only one type of cold.