Some Other Epidemiological Hypotheses

Abstract

In Chapter 1 it was mentioned that two scientists had recently proposed a theory suggesting that the simile of Thomas Willis that the 1658 influenza epidemic had come like a blast from the stars may have been nearer the truth than he had realized. Sir Fred Hoyle, astrophysicist, and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, mathematician, working at University College, Cardiff, South Wales, found themselves unable to explain the behavior of epidemic influenza in the local day schools by direct spread of the virus from the sick. Earlier studies had convinced them that terrestrial life had originated not, as generally supposed, on the Earth itself but in a sort of premetabolic soup in the tails of the abundant comets that are roaming the galaxy. They consider that pristine microorganisms attached to cosmic dust particles are continually being scattered at random into space from such sources, and those that happen to be distributed appropriately are being wafted onto the Earth in the electromagnetic stream known as the solar wind. It is outside the scope of this book to discuss the merit of their theory of the extraterrestrial origin of life on the Earth, but the corollary of the theory as they have applied it to epidemic influenza must be described and discussed.