Armstrong – Table of Contents

until it was safe to start working with Q fever infected laboratory material, the author
used to visit with Atlas in his unit (which the author inherited several years later). Atlas
was very voluble during these visits, and he enjoyed discussing the “important progress”
that he was making with his research. He claimed to have isolated an agent in the fertile
chicken egg that was consistently producing the symptoms of the common cold in human
volunteers at the correctional institution in nearby Lorton, Virginia. Atlas worked alone
with one laboratory technician in Building No. 7. Dr. Topping spent fulltime in his office
in Building No. 1, the NIH Administration Building; he was rarely, if ever sighted in
Building No. 7.
Atlas did not supervise the human volunteer program on a daily basis; he left the
administration of test material and clinical observations to a young laboratory assistant
named Costello. Atlas, however, had shown great energy and initiative in establishing
and organizing his laboratory, and the human volunteer program at Lorton. He was also a
talented tinker. He devised a very clever apparatus for administering test samples into the
nose and for retrieving nasal washings from the volunteers. He also invented a very
efficient aspirator tip for suctioning and harvesting fluids (allantoic and chorionic) from
fertile chicken eggs. He actually published descriptions of these artifacts in the
scientific/technical literature. He gave reprints of these articles (subsequently lost) to the
author but Atlas never managed to provide a reprint of the description of the isolation of
the “cold virus” agent. During Atlas’ relaxed moments in the laboratory, he would take
out his violin and play selections from a few classical compositions. He also “fiddled”
with his very attractive laboratory assistant (whom he late married). Because of his first
and middle names, his political orientation or that of his parents may have been suspect.