Polly Matzinger, PhD: Dangerous Ideas in Immunology

In this conversation, Daniel Belkin and Mitch Belkin interview Polly Matzinger, PhD, about her model of immunology, which she calls 'The Danger Model'. They discuss how The Danger Model helps explain aspects of immunology ignored by the self/non-self model, including why mothers don't reject their fetuses, autoimmune diseases, organ transplant rejection, cancer surveillance, allergy and more.

Polly Matzinger received her PhD in Biology from UCSD before completing a postdoc at Cambridge. She then worked at the Basel Institute for Immunology before moving to the NIH, where she was a section head at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the so-called “Ghost Lab”. She is the creator of the Danger Model (1994), which argues the immune system discriminates between dangerous and safe by recognition of pathogens or alarm signals from injured or stressed cells and tissues.