Museum worthy
From the iron lung to gene sequencing, a new Rotarian learns about polio’s scientific legacy
by Erin Gartner
11 Nov 2026It’s an arresting sight. In a corner of a museum stands a child-sized iron lung, one of the imposing steel cylinders that at the peak of the polio epidemics of the 1940s and ’50s encased paralyzed children up to their necks and forced air into their lungs. They have been described ominously as coffin-like, but they were a miraculous technology, keeping thousands of children breathing with a mechanical whoosh until, in the best case, the tiny patients regained enough strength in their chest muscles to breathe on their own.
The machine — now a relic of a nearly forgotten era before polio vaccines — was part of a unique exhibit this summer at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center in Seattle. Titled the Museum of a Polio-Free World, the displays offered a look at the science and innovation that have brought the world to the brink of eliminating a disease that once paralyzed 350,000 people a year.
Rotary and its partners, including the Gates Foundation, have reduced polio cases by 99.9 percent, and the exhibit offered a glimpse into a future in which polio is nothing but a memory preserved in museums and history books.
As a relatively new Rotary member, I was eager to visit and learn more about this legacy. I know little about the disease, which was eradicated in the United States in 1979, the year I was born. My only real exposure has been through textbooks and Hollywood movies. In other parts of the world, though, it’s not a distant memory at all. Wild polio remains endemic in two countries — Pakistan and Afghanistan — where bringing vaccines to children is still a challenge.
I’m lucky to be visiting the exhibit in July, as about 90 scientists and global health experts are here for a conference on what’s next in polio eradication, allowing me to pull experts aside for explanations. As I weave among them, one of the newest technologies on display catches my eye: microneedle array patches. Placed on a person’s body, the patches use hundreds to thousands of tiny projections to painlessly deliver a drug or vaccine just beneath the skin. They aren’t yet being used for polio vaccines, but their potential is clear.
An iron lung is among items on display at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center.
Image credit: Erin Gartner
To learn more, I track down Kristen Earle, a senior program officer in vaccine development at the Gates Foundation. She’s involved in the clinical testing of the patches for measles and rubella vaccines in Gambia. The patches’ microscopic projections are made of or coated with a dried form of the vaccine. Those microneedles painlessly pierce the outer layer of the skin, delivering the vaccine directly to immune cells underneath. “They look like little Band-Aids, with a small button on the back that goes into the skin,” Earle says. “Any vaccines that are dry are more stable — they’re a powder.”
As a result, Earle says, the patches can go without refrigeration for at least three days, a major advantage over other types of vaccines. “What that means, potentially,” she says, “is that a healthcare worker could put the patches in a backpack and hop on a motorbike to travel to a remote village.”
As I wander the exhibit, I wonder what it’s like for longtime researchers to see decades of advancements all in one place. “It’s a miracle, really,” says Dr. Walt Orenstein, a past director of the U.S. National Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “People don’t understand how terrible a disease polio is.”
