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When he was one day old, Paul off its feet were put in casts. He'd been born with club feet. The treatment healed his left foot, but not his right.

So when Paul was five, he had surgery. But at the time, in the 1950s, the procedure hadn't been perfected.

So I had a failed operation on my right foot, which landed me in Kernan's hospital for crippled children.

Because that was back in the days when children's hospitals would often have names like crippled and feeble-minded in them. So I was there for six weeks.

Paul found the hospital to be a lonely, scary place.

There was one visiting hour a week. The nurses were pretty rough. You were pretty much there and you're bed by yourself.

One of the most distressing parts of his day was listening to the agony of the 20 other children in the ward.

Every one of them was infected with polio.

And I remember that disease. I remember the iron lungs. And I remember something called the sister, Kenny, hot pack treatments, where they would take these scaldingly hot rags, put them on withered muscles of the arms or legs.

And I remember children screaming out in pain. It was hell.

That image of those children who were vulnerable and helpless and alone really drove me to do the things I do.

I think it's why I wanted to medicine because I think that the scars of our childhood invariably become the passions of our adulthood.

Today, Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases and an expert on virology and vaccines.

He devoted his life to developing a vaccine for rotavirus, a major cause of death for young children around the world.

All the suffering he saw growing up could have been avoided if there had been a vaccine for polio. But in the early 1950s, there was no vaccine.

Polio occurs everywhere in this country and throughout the world. Nearly everyone is in repeated contact with the virus and is infected by it at some time in his life.

Polio was a feared and devastating disease. I mean, every year there would be as many as 30, 40,000 children who would be paralyzed by this virus. There would be about 1,500 children who would be killed by this virus.

To what figure this, the worst polio epidemic in history will take us, we do not know.

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