Concept

Hans Selye

Summary
János Hugo Bruno "Hans" Selye (ˈsɛljeɪ; Selye János ˈʃɛjɛ; January 26, 1907 – October 16, 1982) was a pioneering Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist who 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 considers him the first to demonstrate the existence of biological stress. Selye was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on January 26, 1907 and grew up in Komárom (the town with Hungarian majority in present day Slovakia was cut by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920). 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 of Medicine for the first time in 1949. Although he received a total of 17 nominations (1949-1953) in his career, he never won the prize. 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 book The 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. 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.
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