"The hell with them," I thought. "Let them think what they want." At least it was not malicious gossip. We had a friendly crew in the Lab and the ribbing I was taking was all good natured. I went back to my office with a large bundle of case summaries loading me down. With the tremendous interest aroused in virology and the nature of protein molecules, because of the polio research of the Fifties, the drive to investigate the virus theory of cancer and the flu epidemic of 1957, a great deal of money had been spent to make the Civic Hospital a first class research centre. Under Dr. Hallam's guidance and the sponsorship of the University of British Columbia, the Research Laboratory had become one of the best in North America. The Department of Health of B.C. cooperated enthusiastically in the field work and I was able to get from our files the most detailed case histories prepared by their trained investigators. I spread out the charts, picked one at random, and began to study it. Three hours later I was beginning to get the picture, at least up to date. Most of the cases gave a routine history. A few hours before the fever began they had noticed a mild head cold. This was followed by aching in the limbs and back, headache, fever, lack of appetite, and feeling generally ill and depressed. Some had swelling along the sides of their neck or under the chin, but that was not a prominent feature of their complaint. Several of the males also reported slight swelling of the testicles, less than is usually the case in mumps, and it did not seem to incapacitate them at all. The occasional female reported abdominal pains which could have been due to inflamed ovaries, but it is difficult to make such a diagnosis with certainty. In inquiring about the movements of the patients before they became ill, the interrogators had turned up a few odd stories. One woman reported that she had been standing in a crowded bus a few days before she got the flu when a man standing beside her had dropped a glass ball. As she told it, "It looked like one of them souvenir things--you know, the kind that has a snowstorm inside it when you turn it upside down, or maybe it was a Christmas tree ornament. It broke just like you dropped a light bulb or somethin'. I thought I saw a kind of a cloud, like smoke, but it was only for a second. The man was nice about it, he apologised to me right away for scaring me. He was one of them D.P.'s I'm sure because he couldn't talk good English. That stuff that came out of it made my nose kinda itchy ... made me sneeze. But I have hay fever and sinus, you know, had it for years. Maybe there was nothing to it." The tape record of a male patient's report was also peculiar. I played it back, in part, on my own Dictape.