From this thread I learned that there are about 150 different strains of the common cold. There is apparently work to develop a vaccine against many of them but it is a difficult piece of work.
So, instead of going through all that trouble, I decide to get samples of, let’s say, 100 of the most common strains, mix them all together into a virulent stew, and blast a bunch of it up my nose.
Voila! I’m on my way to naturally developing an immunity to the most common strains of the cold, and never need to worry about catching it again.
Or, maybe I’m going to die a horrible common-cold-fueled death.
I really don’t know, what to the Teeming Millions think is going to happen?
*Specifically engineered to contain and absorb colloid buildup, salts, antiseptic enzymes, immunoglobulins, and glycoproteins such as lactoferrin and mucins, produced by goblet cells in the mucous membranes and submucosal glands. *This description appears to be liberally taken from the Wikipedia page on mucus (first paragraph, fourth sentence). That is some truly lazy pseudoscience. At least Gwenyth Paltrow hires people to write original nonsense for GOOP products. (I was hoping this was a joke site but I can’t find any evidence that it is not genuine.)
As for infecting one’s self with “100 colds at once”, this would be a spectacularly bad idea. First of all, there are hundreds of different strains of viruses crossing several major classes and orders of viruses, and within these many strains can rapidly mutate, so that any immunity can be rapidly negated. Second, although these are all classified together as having relatively similar symptoms on the respiratory system, they actually operate in different ways and occupy different tissues, so their effects are compounded. If you’ve ever had a really “bad cold” or one that lingered for more than a couple of weeks it may well have been two or more simultaneous infections, or potentially a sympathetic bacterial infection. And while there is a lot that we have yet to understand about the immune system but it can only produce antibodies at a certain rate, so overtaxing it with multiple infections will prevent the body from effectively fighting infection and can even do damage to the host organism.
Because of these issues it is unlikely that we will ever have a traditional vaccine defense against “the common cold”. Any real system of preventing viral infections would have to operate within the infected cells which produce the virons by inhibiting the processing for foreign DNA/RNA or inhibiting the production of proteins that the virus genome codes for, which isn’t quite magical but it is far beyond the foreseeable state of the art in cellular and molecular immunology.
Some rhinoviruses (and other viruses responsible for upper respiratory infections) are more virulent and likely better at infecting and reproducing than the competition, so I suspect even if you could combine them into an infectious stew, a few would beat out the rest and you’d only get immunity to those few (assuming all you experienced was a really bad cold).
As an alternative, think about staying out of the mall during peak shopping season(s) and washing your hands a lot.
I asked a similar question (+ more cold questions!) back in this threadthat didn’t get a whole lot of traction, although Stranger’s response here is appreciated.