Polly Matzinger facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Polly Matzinger
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| Born | July 21, 1947 La Seyne, France
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| Alma mater | University of California, Irvine (BS) University of California, San Diego (PhD) |
| Known for | Danger model |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Immunology |
| Institutions | National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases |
Polly Celine Eveline Matzinger (born July 21, 1947) is a scientist who studies the immune system. She was born in France. Polly Matzinger is famous for creating a new idea called the danger model. This model helps explain how our bodies fight off sickness and stay healthy.
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Early Life and Education
Polly Matzinger was born on July 21, 1947, in France. Her mother was French, and her father was Dutch. In 1954, she moved to the United States with her family.
She studied biology at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her first degree there in 1976. Later, she continued her studies and received her PhD in biology from the University of California, San Diego in 1979. After her studies, she worked as a researcher at the University of Cambridge in England. She also worked at the Basel Institute for Immunology before joining the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, USA.
Working at NIAID
Polly Matzinger leads a special team at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). This institute helps us understand and fight diseases. Her lab focuses on how T cells in our body learn what is safe and what is dangerous.
Her lab was sometimes called the "Ghost Lab." This was because Polly Matzinger chose to work alone for the first nine months. She wanted to focus deeply on her research, especially on a topic called chaos theory. In 2015, she made a series of eight videos. These videos explained her danger model of the immune system. They covered topics like how our bodies react to organ transplants, tumors, and autoimmunity.
Understanding the Danger Model
For a long time, scientists thought the immune system worked by telling the difference between "self" (our own body parts) and "non-self" (things that don't belong, like germs). This was called the Self/Non-self Model. But in the late 1980s, scientists started to find problems with this idea. They realized that immune cells, especially T cells, needed help to decide what to attack.
Another scientist, Charles Janeway, suggested a new idea in 1989. He thought that a part of our immune system, called the innate immune system, was the main "gatekeeper." He believed it recognized germs by looking for common patterns on them.
How Danger Signals Work
Polly Matzinger took these ideas further with her danger model in 1994. She said that the immune system doesn't just react to germs. Instead, it reacts to "danger signals." These signals are released when cells in our body are hurt or stressed. This is different from normal, controlled cell death.
Imagine a cell getting damaged, like from an injury or an infection. When it breaks down in an uncontrolled way, it sends out "alarm signals." These signals tell the immune system that there's a problem. The immune system then knows it needs to act.
So, according to Matzinger, the immune system responds to danger. It's not just about what's "self" or "non-self." It's about a constant, updated response to actual damage in the body.
What the Danger Model Covers
The danger model is a very broad idea. It helps explain many different things about the immune system. These include:
- How our bodies react to organ transplants.
- How a mother's body accepts a baby during pregnancy.
- Why some people get autoimmune diseases, where the immune system attacks its own body.
- How the immune system might fight cancer.
- How vaccines work.
Matzinger argued that older models couldn't explain why immune responses change depending on where the threat is or how serious it is. They also struggled to explain how the immune system can reject tumors or cause allergic reactions.
Some scientists still prefer Janeway's ideas. They believe the immune system mainly uses special "pattern recognition receptors" to spot germs.
New Ideas on Immune Responses
Polly Matzinger and another scientist, Seung-Yong Seong, have suggested that certain parts of damaged cells can act as danger signals. When cells are stressed, their proteins can fold incorrectly. These misfolded parts can then send out signals that the immune system recognizes as danger.
In 2013, Matzinger wrote an article in Nature Immunology. She emphasized that the danger model means our body's tissues are very important in guiding immune responses. She also thinks that the tiny living things (microbes) in each organ might play a big role in how our immune system reacts.
Questions and Challenges
Like all new scientific ideas, the danger model has faced some questions.
One challenge is about special cells called Regulatory T cells. These cells can stop immune responses. For example, in a disease called IPEX syndrome, if these cells don't work right, people get severe autoimmune problems. Matzinger has updated her danger model to include these cells. She says their job isn't always to stop responses completely. For instance, transplanted organs are rejected more often if they are infected. This shows that danger signals still guide the immune response.
Another point of discussion is about tumors. Matzinger suggested that tumors might grow because their cells die in a controlled way, not sending out danger signals. However, recent research shows that the immune system can sometimes find and destroy tumors. Also, the danger model explains transplant rejection as damage from surgery. But it's harder to explain why moving tissue from one part of the body to another (autotransplantation) is usually well-accepted.
Despite these discussions, many terms Polly Matzinger created, like "danger signal" and "DAMPs", are now commonly used in immunology.
Awards and Recognition
Polly Matzinger has received several awards for her work:
- In 1986, she won an award at the Köln Film Festival for a German version of her film Immunity: The Inside Story.
- In 1996, she became an honorary lifetime member of the Scandinavian Society of Immunology.
- In 2002, Discover magazine named her one of the fifty most important women in science.
- In 2003, she received an honorary doctorate from Hasselt University.
- In 2008, she was listed as a "Highly Cited" researcher. This means her work is among the top 1% of most-cited papers in her field.
Since 2009, a company called EpiVax has funded the Polly Matzinger Fearless Scientist Scholarship. This scholarship helps women scientists at the University of Rhode Island who overcome challenges in their studies.
Films About the Immune System
Polly Matzinger has also helped create films to explain science to a wider audience:
- Immunity: the inside story (1986): An animated film that explains how our bodies fight off the flu. It won an award and was translated into several languages.
- A quick look at tissue rejection (1991): A short animated film that shows how the body rejects a skin graft.
- Death by Design/The Life and Times of Life and Times (1995): A film about cell death that features Polly Matzinger's work.
- Turned on by Danger (1997): A BBC Horizon program that focused on and explained her danger model.
- Microbe Invasion (2001): This film talked about how our bodies live with many tiny organisms. It featured the danger model as a good way to understand these relationships.
