Following stints as a bass player, a dog trainer, a carpenter, a biology student, and a Playboy bunny, Polly Matzinger had taken a job as a cocktail waitress in a restaurant near the University of California at Davis. One evening she was serving a couple of scientists, one of whom was Robert Swampy Schwab, then chairman of wildlife and fisheries at Davis and now a professor emeritus. Schwab and his colleague were talking about a recent experiment when their waitress pointed out a few errors in their reasoning. We said, ‘Holy cow, who’s that?’
Matzinger and Schwab struck up an acquaintance. She had a penetrating mind, says Schwab. She could spot the problem, the picture, and half the solution. There are people who are suited for research, and you can spot them. Says Matzinger: He started a nine-month campaign. He said, ‘You’re a scientist! You should be a scientist.’ And I said, ‘Go away--it’s going to get boring, like any other job. Everything gets boring after a while.’ And then he’d come back at closing time and we’d go to an all-night Denny’s and talk science.
Those talks, says Matzinger, helped her decide to return to school and become a scientist. A few years later, when Schwab got wind that Matzinger was receiving funding to do immunology research, Schwab’s colleague dismissed her as a charlatan. He said, ‘She’s just a barmaid,’ Schwab remembers. But I said, ‘No, I think it’s true. If more barmaids had minds like hers, you and I would be out of a job.’
Nearly 20 years later, the erstwhile barmaid is now chief of an immunology lab at the National Institutes of Health, the author of dozens of scientific papers, and the creator of an award-winning film about the immune system. But she is still poking holes in the reasoning of scientists. In fact, Matzinger thinks there is a big hole right in the heart of immunology. For almost 50 years, immunologists have thought they understood the fundamental job of the immune system: it was to recognize the difference between self and nonself, and to defend the body against the alien. Matzinger disagrees. She says the immune system doesn’t bother with a sense of self--it just has a clear sense of danger.
The self/nonself model dates from the end of World War II, and some historians have argued that it--and the wide support it has enjoyed-- may have been shaped by cold war xenophobia. But the man whose research laid the experimental foundations for the model was a prophet of immunologic tolerance. One day in 1944, Peter Medawar, then a zoologist at Oxford--and not yet Sir Peter the Nobel Prize winner--was sitting in his garden with his family when a Royal Air Force bomber buzzed over at low altitude and crashed a couple hundred yards down the road. A badly burned pilot was pulled from the wreckage, and the surgeon at the local hospital, a colleague of Medawar’s, asked for Medawar’s help in treating the victim with skin grafts.
