This is Polly Matzinger, and even though this is a history Instagram post, she is an active scientist. But her discoveries about the way the immune system works have changed how scientists think about the ways living things fight off harmful pathogens, thus ensuring Matzinger a place in humanity’s historical records.
Before I say anything about her scientific research, though, I am going to relay some bibliographical details — Polly Matzinger is one scientist whose life so far has been the opposite of boring. Of half-French and half-Dutch ancestry (her father survived Dachau), Polly Matzinger was born in 1947 and emigrated from France to the U.S. when she was seven. She grew up loving dogs and bored with school, and her high-school yearbook described her as “most likely to not succeed.”.
Matzinger took a lot of time before earning her B.S. in biology at age 25 — she was a Jazz musician, a dog trainer, a bartender, and even a Playboy Bunny. But conversations she began having with a couple of biology professors while working as a cocktail waitress changed her career choice. She had an insatiable curiosity and a questioning mind, and these talents contributed to her obtaining a Ph.D. and running a lab dealing with immunology.
Polly Matzinger challenged a then-accepted model of how cells fight off pathogens. Whereas earlier, the favored idea was that cells fight off things they recognize as “non-self,” Matzinger argued that cells fight off things they recognize as dangerous, and do so based on the type of cell tissue they are made of. Matzinger was one of two scientists who first termed the innate immune response called “DAMPS” (danger-associated molecular patterns), which every basic immunology textbook now refers to.
Our knowledge about the immune system is always evolving, much like the immune system itself, and much like the fascinating life-so-far of Polly Matzinger.
Additionally, Matzinger ran into trouble when she published an article in a prestigous journal that attributed authorship to both herself and another . . . unbeknownst to the editor, it was her dog! She did this because she wanted to use the first-person plural (“we”) instead of the boring “it was found that . . .” passive voice, but all the scholarship was hers and she didn’t want to only refer to herself in the first person. When the editor found out, he refused to ever publish one of Matzinger’s articles again. Eventually, the editor died and Matzinger was able to publish in that journal.
