My Last Will and Testament on Rapid Elimination and Ultimate Global Eradication of Poliomyelitis and Measles

It is a special pleasure for me to participate in today's symposium, in honor of my cousin Saul Krugman's 80th birthday and to celebrate his important contributions to our knowledge of infectious diseases. It so happens that I have also spent my life in the pursuit of knowledge of infectious diseases, and yet, despite our close family relationship—he is the son of my mother's brother—our paths rarely crossed until he was 35 years old. It was then that Saul, without any special training in bacteriology, virology, immunology, or pathology, decided to spend his life in academic pediatrics and infectious diseases. Was there any link between Saul's career in infectious diseases and my own, which began 64 years ago? In October 1946, after 5 years as a flight surgeon and a 6 months' residency at the Willard Parker Hospital, then the center for all the horrible communicable diseases of children in New York City, Saul applied for a residency in pediatrics. But there were no vacancies for this 35-year-old World War II veteran. It was then that Saul came to Cincinnati to seek my advice. In 1940, after a pediatric residency at Hopkins, Dr Robert Ward came to my laboratory to work on polio and other viruses. In 1943, when I left Cincinnati to join the Army, Robbie Ward was not accepted by the Army because of an old tuberculous lesion acquired on the wards of the Hopkins Harriet Lane Hospital, and he joined John R. Paul at Yale to work on polio and hepatitis.