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One autumn day, luxuriating in a 5¢ trolley ride home, Polly opened her chemistry book for the first time. She was fascinated, and from then on, chemistry made school bearable.
"She may have wasted her time in relation to marks." says her mother, "but never in relation to learning." In that mood. Polly followed her mother to Vassar ('31). When the dean asked her why she wanted to go there, Polly honestly answered: "I think it's the line of least resistance." But she went on learning in her own fashion.
The Need to Know. One year she skipped note taking entirely to see if she could learn better; she read piles of books, grew rapidly fonder of science, spent nights in a sleeping bag atop her dormitory to try to understand the theory of the expanding universe. She was also Vassar's hop, skip and jump champion, but dating never interested her. "I think I would have liked to go out more," she recalls. "But I just hadn't met anyone I thought was worth giving an evening to. I was pretty absorbed."
Her big crush was bacteriology. Her desire to learn about it drove Polly's marks up to Phi Beta Kappa level, and it was pure interest, not career ambition. "I just had to find out about those little bacteria," she says. Polly went from Vassar to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where the workings of bacteria were being intensively studied.
Best of all, "the students basically educated each other. Everyone cared tremendously about finding out what was really true. It was by defending everything and fighting it out in the lab that you learned." And in the idyllic lake country around Madison, work merged with play. They were all ardent hikers, picnickers and skate sailors; Polly used to skate with a sail made of an old agricultural exhibit sign reading IT PAYS TO FEED THE CALF WHOLE MILK.
In three years at Wisconsin. Polly picked up an M.A. and a Ph.D. She also found her future husband, a tall, lean, kindly medical student ("with a sort of quiet power") named Henry Bunting, the son of a pathology professor in whose class they met. After two years of hiking and bird watching, "we just knew we were going to be married."
Can Spiders Smell? Back in Brooklyn while Henry went off to Johns Hopkins (which had a rule preventing interns from marrying), Polly got a frantic call from Vermont's Bennington College. Could she start teaching genetics next Monday? Genetics was Greek to Polly, but she marched into class with the premise that "dogs have dogs, cats have cats, and you built it up from there."
As it turned out, "Bennington was so arty that they didn't care how7 you taught science, even if you were a twerp." She also discovered that she "learned faster than those students, and they had higher IQs." She had learned the art of learning: finding the key questions that unlock big answers. Ever since, she has been known for giving students odd research problems (Can spiders smell?) that lead to revealing answers (yes, with their legs).