Hans Selye

Hans Selye was a pioneering endocrinologist whose lifelong research at McGill University and later the Université de Montréal introduced the concept of biological stress into the scientific and popular lexicon. In 1936, he published his foundational paper in Nature demonstrating that organisms respond to nonspecific physical and emotional stressors through a tripartite pattern he called General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS).

Selye distinguished between constructive stress (eustress) and damaging chronic stress (distress), writing more than thirty books and 1,500 scientific papers. Nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Prize, he laid the modern physiological foundations of psychosomatic medicine and neuroendocrinology.