The Bunny Years (52 page)

D
R.
P
OLLY
M
ATZINGER

I
t was a great job,” professor Polly Matzinger recalls about her days as a Bunny in the Denver Playboy Club in 1969. Today, she is the head of the T-cell Tolerance and Memory section of the National Institutes of Health's Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Immunology, and the scientist who came up with the groundbreaking theory she calls the Danger Model.

The daughter of a French mother, who is an exnun, and a Dutch father, who is a painter and former KLM steward, Polly immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 9. The family's first home was a rented bungalow in the heart of Hollywood. Before her senior year in high-school, the family moved to Laguna Hills, where Polly's classmates voted her Most Likely Not to Succeed. “I didn't fit in very well,” Polly says, “and quit going to classes. But then, my parents believed that in America if you want something and you're willing to work for it, you can have it—and my career is kind of an example of that.” Polly, who left school at 16 without a high school diploma, enrolled in a local junior college to study music and become a composer. She found work as a carpenter and a bass player with a jazz group, and she considered becoming a veterinarian.

In 1969, when she moved to Boulder, Colorado, with a boyfriend who was in graduate school, she looked first for a waitress job. “The problem was that all the good restaurants only hired men as waiters, so I went to Denver—and there was the Playboy Club.” The Club, on the 14th floor of the Hyatt House, had opened in December 1967 and featured a rooftop pool.

“I was struck by one of the questions on the Bunny job application: ‘What do you feel yourself to be an expert in?' Playboy used that information to select the most suitable Bunnies to do various promotions. I had never been asked that before, and it made me think what I would be most qualified to talk about. My answer was Dogs. Yes, I felt I was an expert on dogs. Many of the women were students going to school, an amazing group. Bunnies weren't just pieces of flesh, but interesting women, able to talk to people.

“We also participated in athletic charity events. On one occasion, the Denver Playboy Bunnies played the United Airlines Clipped Wings, a group of retired stewardesses, in a game of broom hockey. Like most of the Bunnies on our team, I couldn't ice skate, but was willing to give it a try. The Clipped Wings had been practicing for months. During the game, there were Bunnies scattered everywhere falling on the ice. We were at such a disadvantage, even given a handicap of two goalies, that we lost 6—0.

“I made the most money playing billiards as a Pool Bunny, earning 40 cents an hour salary and a dollar a game, with the first $17 going to the Club. If you play a hundred games a night at the same table night after night, you get pretty hard to beat. Then you make some crazy triple bank shot and everyone wants to play you because they think you couldn't possibly do it again. I was able to save a fair amount of money.”

Polly as one of the “Easter Bunnies” delivering baskets to Vietnam veterans at Fitzsimmons Hospital.

Curiously, it was Polly's waitressing work that led her, at the age of 26, into a career in science. “I got to listen to a lot of great conversations. Two professors would come in and talk science. One day they were talking about animal mimicry—how one butterfly will mimic another butterfly and how a good-tasting butterfly will mimic a bad-tasting butterfly to avoid being eaten by birds.” Polly, who had studied biology, asked them a question she'd wondered about for years. “Why has no animal ever mimicked a skunk? A raccoon with a stripe down its back would have a selective advantage. Their mouths fell open—a cocktail waitress asking this sort of question? They didn't know how to answer it.

“One of the scientists launched a personal campaign to persuade me to go to university and take up science. This man convinced me that science was actually something I could do. Otherwise, I could have worked as a cocktail waitress forever because it was a job that never got boring.” After 11 years spent earning a college degree, Polly enrolled at the University of California at San Diego and got a government fellowship for graduate students. In 1979, after getting her biology degree, she went to England to do a four-year postdoctorate at Cambridge University funded by a National Institutes of Health overseas fellowship, followed by a six-year fellowship at Hoffman-LaRoche in Basle, Switzerland. By 1989, she was ready to take up residence at NIH.

Polly's day begins at 5 a.m. at her Maryland farmland home near the National Institutes of Health. She also volunteers many hours at local hospitals with her Border collie Annie, an officially licensed “therapy dog.” Weekends are often spent at sheepdog trials.

There, with a colleague, she began to develop her theory, ultimately called “The Danger Model,” described by the London Telegraph as “potentially the most far-reaching development in immunology this century.” She and her colleagues had become convinced that a really effective immune system would only attack things it perceived to be dangerous. But they didn't know how the system figured out what was dangerous.

Months later, “I was in the bath and . . . all of a sudden—there it was! I jumped out of the bath totally naked, dripping water all over the house, unable to sit still.” Her breakthrough realization? “The way the immune system could discriminate between things that are dangerous and things that aren't is that things that are dangerous do damage. It sounds so simple and it had taken so long.”

If proved correct, her theories, grossly oversimplified here, have important implications for the treatment of cancers and transplants. Even now, several scientists and doctors are putting her findings into practice with promising results.

“One of the things I didn't know when I went into research is that you have to be willing to live a life that's 90 percent depression and 10 percent elation because 90 percent of what you do fails. Part of the reason for that is that we're working on the edge. We fail again and again, but every so often, one of those failures gives us a glimmer of how to try something a different way. That bit of elation keeps you going.

“If I'm right, we'll have a new treatment for cancer. I hope I am right, because after all the billions of dollars spent on cancer research, we still treat cancer the same way we did 20 years ago—radiation, chemotherapy and surgery.”

Still, the remarkable Bunny-turned-breakthrough-scientist has her critics, partially as a result of her readiness to talk to the press. “People are afraid of what they don't know. As a scientist, I feel we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't go out and talk about these things.” However, when the BBC was preparing a documentary on her, she almost backed out upon finding they were so interested in her Bunny past.

“I don't mind that—it's part of my life and I'm completely open. I was worried at first because it wasn't clear whether they were going to use the oddities of my personality to illustrate science, or use the science as an excuse to talk about this odd person. At 50 I'm still seen as the young ex-Bunny. How old do I have to get?”

A last bit of confirmation for the former Bunny and high school dropout voted Least Likely to Succeed: a British journal recently got in touch with her for an article on “The Most Influential Women in the World.”