Armstrong – Table of Contents

Montana. At this meeting Topping exuded charm, congratulations and sincere advice on
the current research that the author was doing in Dr. Robert J. Huebner’s laboratory.
In 1945, by his own account (46), Topping lost interest in doing further work on
rickettsias. He decided to study viruses and selected the “common cold” as the preferred
entity for investigation. The discussion that followed in his autobiography about the
“common cold” research was a complete whitewash of the events that occurred in the
next several years. Topping organized or outlined a plan of investigation with the
assistance of a new associate, a physician who had just completed his internship in
internal medicine, named Leon Trotsky Atlas. The author was acquainted casually with
Dr. Atlas when Atlas interned at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston from
July 1945 to July 1946. The author was a medical student at the time and interned at the
same hospital two years later from 1947 to 1948. Topping had apparently arranged for
one of the six work units in Building No. 7 to be assigned for common cold research. The
first mention of studies of the “common cold” appeared in the 1947 Annual Report of the
Surgeon General (47): “Limited studies on the common cold were started in January
(1947). The unit for the study consists of two sections, one engaged primarily in
laboratory investigations and the other consisting of human volunteers in one of the local
correctional institutions (District of Columbia Correctional Institution, Lorton
Reformatory, Lorton, Virginia). The infectiousness of nasal washings from individuals
suffering from the common cold was investigated in the human volunteer group. In turn,
nasal washings from them were inoculated into fertile eggs and serial passages were
performed. At least one agent has been isolated which probably originated from humans.