Only a few internationally celebrated scientists came into their fields as elaborately as Polly Matzinger. Matzinger was born in southeastern France on July 21, 1947, and moved to the United States in 1954.In 2002, she was included in the list of the “50 most important women in science” by Discover magazine for her outstanding contribution to the human immune system. After graduating from the University of California in Science in 1965, she took up various jobs including a cocktail waitress. Later, she completed her doctorate in biology at UC San Diego in 1979 followed by postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge and Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland. Later Matzinger earned praise for her “danger theory” of immunology, which was published in 1994.
