Karen Torgaly

We lived in San Francisco when I was a child, and it was in the mid-1950s, just before the polio vaccine came out that Salk developed.

My brother was 12 and a half months older than me, so we were very close and good buddies.

He was three and a half, and I was two and a half.

My first memory of anything is seeing him sitting on a table with my dad, moving his legs and asking him to move his legs, and he was crying a lot.

So because he was crying, I was crying, and I didn't understand why my dad was doing something that would hurt him or what was going on.

So the result for my brother was that he had one leg that was smaller than the other, but it didn't hold him back in any significant way, and he was able to pass his physical to get into the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, so he did pretty well.

It was very obvious if they knew him.

I asked about a number of other scientists too, Jonas Halk and Hilary Koprowski and some of the others.

And if they knew them, it didn't seem to make a big impression on them.

But if I asked them about Albert Sabin, I could tell right away just by their body language.

And usually I could see that there was a story coming and that it was going to be interesting because he was such an abrasive but also interesting character in other ways.

There was one scientist who had brought a paper with him.

that he had sent to Albert Sabin for his input, and it was full of red marks.

They were so deep in the paper, it looked like he was really angry when he was correcting it with lots of exclamation points and nasty remarks all over it.

And the scientist was holding it up as if it was sort of a badge of honor because he passed the surveillance test by Albert Sabin.

His daughters told me when I met them, and his daughters are close to my age, he was angry a lot.

He was a perfectionist and expected them to do everything perfectly.

So it was a difficult life for them.

Well, it's interesting because he was an immigrant.

He was born in 1906 in Poland.