The Cold Warriors

If medical researchers fail to cook up a cure for the common cold in our lifetime, it won't be for lack of trying. The cold may be a relatively trivial annoyance, but it's not even close to a trivial problem. Despite its name, for instance, the common cold is caused by not one common virus but five different viral families, encompassing a couple of hundred unique viral strains among them. These strains are sufficiently different from one another that even after catching one, we can later be infected and rendered miserable by all the others. This explains why toddlers seem to be in a continuous state of sniffles--being tabulae rasae for every strain that comes along--while adults become ever more immune with each ensuing cold and often go years before encountering a strain they've never had. The regrettable implication is that researchers will have to come up with a cure ...