On Jul. 8, 1933, Christopher Andrewes, Laidlaw and W Smith from the Medical Research Council (MRC) reported that they had isolated a virus from humans infected with influenza from an epidemic then raging.

They had done this by infecting ferrets with filtered extracts from infected humans – after the fortuitous observation that ferrets could apparently catch influenza from infected investigators. The ‘ferret model’ proved valuable as strains of influenza virus could be clinically distinguished from one another. The research findings were published in The Lancet.