ABSTRACT

In fall , a team of virus researchers from the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in London joined groups of physicians and pathologists at hospitals and military establishments in a crucial series of medical studies aimed at tackling the cause and control of influenza. Two years earlier, three NIMR workers, P.P. Laidlaw, Wilson Smith, and C.H. Andrewes, discovered that they could use ferrets to isolate a ‘filterable virus’ from flu patients and, with this research animal, begin to determine flu’s identity as a ‘virus disease’. e discovery, noted the institute’s director, Sir Henry Dale, had drawn flu ‘within the realm of experiment’, for it made it possible to elucidate the relation between the virus and the disease, and to explore the nature of flu immunity.1 Within a year, the team had added a laboratory mouse to their experimental system and the animal became the basis for a serological test that enabled them to identify and measure ‘neutralizing’ antibodies associated with the virus, and thus indirectly determine its presence in human populations. ese developments went far towards transforming flu into an object of virus research. But establishing flu’s viral identity required more than a working experimental system. As the NIMR workers knew, such efforts would hinge on their ability to link the virus disease they developed in ferrets and mice with what the medical profession and public health authorities knew as ‘influenza’. e team had to confront the critical problem of how to make a laboratory object relevant to constituencies outside the laboratory walls. It was to this end that the NIMR, through its governing body, the Medical Research Council (MRC), initiated its collaborative research scheme to correlate laboratory and clinical knowledge in support of a new definition of flu.