Hans Selye

János Hugo Bruno "Hans" Selye CC (/ˈsɛlj/; Hungarian: Selye János; January 26, 1907 – October 16, 1982), was a pioneering Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist. He conducted important scientific work on the hypothetical non-specific response of an organism to stressors. Although he did not recognize all of the many aspects of glucocorticoids, Selye was aware of their role in the stress response. Charlotte Gerson[2] considers him the first to demonstrate the existence of biological stress.

Hans Selye

Selye in the 1970s
Born(1907-01-26)January 26, 1907
DiedOctober 16, 1982(1982-10-16) (aged 75)
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Other namesSelye János (Hungarian)
Scientific career
InfluencedMarshall McLuhan[1]

Biography

Selye was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on January 26, 1907 and grew up in Komárom, Hungary.[3] Selye's father was a doctor of Hungarian ethnicity and his mother was Austrian. He became a Doctor of Medicine and Chemistry in Prague in 1929 and went on to do pioneering work in stress and endocrinology at Johns Hopkins University, McGill University, and the Université de Montréal. He was nominated for the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for the first time in 1949. Although he received a total of 17 nominations in his career, he never won the prize.[4][5]

Selye died on October 16, 1982 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He often returned to visit Hungary, giving lectures as well as interviews in Hungarian television programs. He conducted a lecture in 1973 at the Hungarian Scientific Academy in Hungarian and observers noted that he had no accent, despite spending many years abroad. His bookThe Stress of Life appeared in Hungarian as Az Életünk és a stressz in 1964 and became a bestseller. Selye János University, the only Hungarian-language university in Slovakia, was named after him. Selye's mother was killed by gunfire during Hungary's anti-Communist revolt of 1956.

Stress Research

Bust of Hans Selye at Selye János University, Komárno, Slovakia

Selye's interest in stress began when he was in medical school; he had observed that patients with various chronic illnesses like tuberculosis and cancer appeared to display a common set of symptoms that he attributed to what is now commonly called stress. After completing his medical degree and a doctorate degree in organic chemistry at the German University of Prague, he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and later moved to the Department of Biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal where he studied under the sponsorship of James Bertram Collip.[6] While working with laboratory animals, Selye observed a phenomenon that he thought resembled what he had previously seen in chronic patients. Rats exposed to cold, drugs, or surgical injury exhibited a common pattern of responses; this "general adaptation syndrome" or "Selyes syndrome" was triphasic, involving an initial alarm phase followed by a stage of resistance or adaptation and, finally, a stage of exhaustion and death.[7] Working with doctoral student Thomas McKeown (1912–88), Selye published a report that used the word “stress” to describe these responses to adverse events.[8]

His last inspiration for general adaptation syndrome (GAS, a theory of stress) came from an endocrinological experiment in which he injected mice with extracts of various organs. He at first believed he had discovered a new hormone, but was proved wrong when every irritating substance he injected produced the same symptoms (swelling of the adrenal cortex, atrophy of the thymus, gastric and duodenal ulcers).[9] This, paired with his observation that people with different diseases exhibit similar symptoms, led to his description of the effects of "noxious agents" as he at first called it. He later coined the term "stress", which has been accepted into the lexicon of most other languages.[10]

Selye has acknowledged the influence of Claude Bernard (who developed the idea of milieu intérieur) and Walter Cannon's "homeostasis". Selye conceptualized the physiology of stress as having two components: a set of responses which he called the "general adaptation syndrome", and the development of a pathological state from ongoing, unrelieved stress.

Selye discovered and documented that stress differs from other physical responses in that stress is stressful whether one receives good or bad news, whether the impulse is positive or negative. He called negative stress "distress" and positive stress "eustress". The system whereby the body copes with stress, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) system, was also first described by Selye. He also pointed to an "alarm state", a "resistance state", and an "exhaustion state", largely referring to glandular states. Later he developed the idea of two "reservoirs" of stress resistance, or alternatively stress energy.

Selye wrote The Stress of Life (1956), From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist (1964) and Stress without Distress (1974). He worked as a professor and director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal. In 1975 he created the International Institute of Stress, and in 1979, Dr. Selye and Arthur Antille started the Hans Selye Foundation. Later Selye and eight Nobel laureates founded the Canadian Institute of Stress.[11]

In 1968 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1976, he was awarded the Loyola Medal by Concordia University.[12]

Controversy and Involvement with the Tobacco Industry

Although it was not widely known at the time, Selye began consulting for the tobacco industry starting in 1958; he had previously sought funding from the industry, but had been denied. Later, New York attorney Edwin Jacob contacted Selye as he prepared a defense against liability actions brought against tobacco companies. The companies wanted Selye's help in arguing that the recognized correlation between smoking and cancer was not proof of causality. The firm offered to pay Selye $1000 to make a statement supporting this claim. He agreed but refused to testify. Tobacco industry lawyers reported that Selye was willing to incorporate industry advice when writing about smoking and stress. One lawyer advised him to "comment on the unlikelihood of there being a mechanism by which smoking could cause cardiovascular disease” and to emphasize the “stressful” effect that anti-smoking messages had on the US population.[13]

Publicly, Selye never declared his consultancy work for the tobacco industry. In a 1967 letter to "Medical Opinion and Review," he argued against government over-regulation of science and public health, implying that his views on smoking were objective: “I purposely avoided any mention of government-supported research because, being too largely dependent upon it, I may not be able to view the subject objectively. However, I do not use … cigarettes so let these examples suffice.” In June 1969, Selye (then director of the Institute of Experimental Pathology, University of Montreal) testified before the Canadian House of Commons Health Committee against anti-smoking legislation, opposing advertising restrictions, health warnings, and restrictions on tar and nicotine. For his testimony Selye was funded $50 000 per year for a 3-year “special project,” by CTR executive William Hoyt with another $50,000 a year pledged by the Canadian tobacco industry. His comments on smoking were used worldwide, Philip Morris (Tobacco company) used Selye's statements on the benefits of smoking to argue against the use of health warnings on tobacco products in Sweden. Similarly, in 1977 the Australian Cigarette Manufacturers quoted Selye extensively in their submission to the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Social Welfare.[14]

In 1999, the US Department of Justice brought an anti-racketeering case against 7 tobacco companies (British American Tobacco, Brown & Williamson, Philip Morris, Liggett, American Tobacco Company, RJ Reynolds, and Lorillard), the CTR, and the Tobacco Institute. As a result, the industry's influence on stress research was revealed.[15]

Former graduate students

Publications

  • "A Syndrome Produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents" - 1936 article by Hans Selye from The journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences
  • The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956, ISBN 978-0070562127
  • Selye, H. (Oct 7, 1955). "Stress and disease". Science. 122 (3171): 625–631. doi:10.1126/science.122.3171.625. PMID 13255902.
  • From Dream to Discovery: On being a scientist. New York: McGraw-Hill 1964, ISBN 978-0405066160
  • Hormones and Resistance. Berlin; New York: Springer-Verlag, 1971, ISBN 978-3540054115
  • Stress Without Distress. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., c1974, ISBN 978-0397010264

See also

References

  1. Kroker, Arthur (1984). Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant. Montreal: New World Perspectives. p. 73. hdl:1828/7129. ISBN 978-0-920393-14-7.
  2. Healing the Gerson Way, Defeating Cancer and Other Chronic Diseases, New Edition. Charlotte Gerson with Beata Bishop, Gerson Health Media, 2010, p. 48.
  3. "Hans Selye". Encyclopædia Britannica (2008 ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 2008-06-12.
  4. The Nomination Database for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1901-1953
  5. "Nomination Archive". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 2018-12-01.
  6. Jackson, Mark (2014), Cantor, David; Ramsden, Edmund (eds.), "Evaluating the Role of Hans Selye in the Modern History of Stress", Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century, Open Access Monographs and Book Chapters Funded by Wellcome Trust, University of Rochester Press, ISBN 9781580464765, PMID 26962615, retrieved 2018-12-02
  7. "Dr. Hans Selye | Canadian Medical Hall of Fame". www.cdnmedhall.org. Retrieved 2018-12-02.
  8. Koops, Matthias (2010), "Historical Account of the Substances Which have been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas, from the Earliest Date, to the Invention of Paper", Cambridge University Press, pp. 7–258, doi:10.1017/cbo9780511694530.002, hdl:2027/gri.ark:/13960/t04x8wd2g, ISBN 9780511694530 Missing or empty |title= (help)
  9. Hans Selye, "The General Adaptation Syndrome and the Diseases of Adaptation" (two parts), Journal of Allergy [later and Clinical Immunology] 17/4 (July 1946): 231–247; and 17/6 (Nov. 1946): 358-98. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/0021-8707(46)90148-7 and (conclusion) https://www.jacionline.org/article/0021-8707(46)90159-1/pdf
  10. Selye, Hans (1956). The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill. Discussed in Mark Jackson, "The Pursuit of Happiness: The Social and Scientific Origins of Hans Selye’s Natural Philosophy of Life", History of the Human Sciences 25/2 (Dec. 2012): 13-29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695112468526 and, with reference to use/translation of the term stress into many languages, Russell Viner, "Putting Stress in Life: Hans Selye and the Making of Stress Theory", Social Studies of Science 29/3 (June 1999): 391-410. Online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/285410
  11. "Welcome To The Canadian Institute Of Stress". Stresscanada.org. Retrieved 2010-06-13.
  12. "Hans Selye". www.concordia.ca. Retrieved 2017-08-17.
  13. Petticrew, Mark P.; Lee, Kelley (March 2011). "The "Father of Stress" Meets "Big Tobacco": Hans Selye and the Tobacco Industry". American Journal of Public Health. 101 (3): 411–418. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2009.177634. ISSN 0090-0036. PMC 3036703. PMID 20466961.
  14. Petticrew, Mark P.; Lee, Kelley (March 2011). "The "Father of Stress" Meets "Big Tobacco": Hans Selye and the Tobacco Industry". American Journal of Public Health. 101 (3): 411–418. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2009.177634. ISSN 0090-0036. PMC 3036703. PMID 20466961.
  15. Petticrew, Mark P.; Lee, Kelley (March 2011). "The "Father of Stress" Meets "Big Tobacco": Hans Selye and the Tobacco Industry". American Journal of Public Health. 101 (3): 411–418. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2009.177634. ISSN 0090-0036. PMC 3036703. PMID 20466961.
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