Influenza Germ Found

In the ramshackle bacteriological laboratory of the rich University of Chicago, where often "rats destroy in a night the fruits of six months' work,"* Dr. Isidore Sydney Falk has discovered, the university announced last week, the germ which causes influenza. It is the polymorphous streptococcus. When the news reached London, where investigators have been at the same problem, the London Times called Dr. Falk from bed to answer its transAtlantic telephone questions. It was 11 a. m. in London. 5 a. m. in Chicago. It was a half-hour later when Dr. Falk returned to his bed.

This polymorphous streptococcus is the changeable germ which Harvard's great hygienist Milton Joseph Rosenau told an American Medical Association Convention 13 years ago was probably the cause of many baffling infections.

Its possible connection with the 1918 world influenza epidemic was neglected for the theory, best formulated by Simon Flexner and the late great Hideyo Noguchi, that a virus so fine that it seeped through the finest unglazed porcelain was the cause. Dr. Falk went back to the Rosenau indication. When influenza struck Chicago severely last winter, he and his assistants took cultured smears from every throat they could reach. They slept on their desks to avoid losing time.

From the throat of Ruth M. McKinney, one of the graduate staff working for a doctor's degree, they secured the most useful cultures. It was of the polymorphous streptococcus. It "looks like a microscopic chain of unmatched beads which a child has strung together." When this germ collects into minute, smooth colonies in the blood, it causes a cold or mild influenza. When the colonies become rough, the influenza grows severe, virulent. With the specific cause of influenza thus recognized, an intelligent way of treatment and a vaccine for prevention lies in purview.

*Sad observation by the university's new young president Robert Maynard Hutchins. President Hutchins, like Dr. Falk. was born in Brooklyn, is just 30, was graduated from Yale.

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