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Hans Selye: The Discovery of Stress
by Gerald Gabriel
G.A.S. Spells Stress
As with so many wondrous discoveries of science and medicine, it was by chance that Hungarian-born Hans Selye (1907-1982) stumbled upon the idea of the General Adaptation Syndrome (G.A.S.), which he first wrote about in the British journal Nature in the summer of 1936. The G.A.S., alternately known as the stress syndrome, is what Selye came to call the process under which the body confronts "stress" (what he first called "noxious agents"). In the G.A.S., Selye explained, the body passes through three universal stages of coping. First there is an "alarm reaction," in which the body prepares itself for "fight or flight." No organism can sustain this condition of excitement, however, and a second stage of adaptation ensues (provided the organism survives the first stage). In the second stage, a resistance to the stress is built. Finally, if the duration of the stress is sufficiently long, the body eventually enters a stage of exhaustion, a sort of aging "due to wear and tear."
"Stress," in Selye's lexicon, could be anything from prolonged food deprivation to the injection of a foreign substance into the body, to a good muscular workout; by "stress," he did not mean only "nervous stress," but "the nonspecific response of the body to any demand."
Selye's breakthrough ideas about stress helped to forge an entirely new medical field - the study of biological stress and its effects - which blossomed through the middle part of the twentieth century to include the work of thousands of researchers, and it is a science that continues to make advances today by connecting stress to illness and discovering new ways to help the body efficiently deal with life's wear and tear.
Though his efforts were met with skepticism early on (he did suggest some fairly radical things, including the idea that stress had a causal relationship to a number of major illnesses - heart disease and cancer, among them), Selye's impeccable methods and research gradually won out, and his ideas were eventually treated with respect by health and science professionals of every stripe.
In Selye's own words, his discovery was just "enough to prevent the concept from ever slipping through our fingers again; [making] it amenable to a precise scientific analysis."
Stressed-out Lab Rats
Selye had actually been searching for a new hormone when he stumbled upon all of this. In 1934, at the age of 28, he was an assistant at McGill University's Biochemistry Department in Montreal. He was a promising young endocrinologist carrying out quite orthodox biochemical experimentation involving the injection of rats with ovarian extract. His hope was to uncover changes in the organism that could not be caused by any known sex hormone, and the initial results gave him cause for great optimism.
The rats developed a triad of symptoms from the extract injections, including enlargement of the adrenal cortex, atrophy of the thymus, spleen, and lymph nodes, and deep bleeding ulcers in the lining of the stomach and duodenum -- all of which could be increased or decreased in severity by adjusting the amount of extract.
It seemed obvious to the young Selye that he was on the verge of pinpointing a new hormone, as none then known produced these sort of symptoms. "You may well imagine my happiness!" he writes. "At the age of 28, I already seemed to be on the track of a new hormone."
His hopes began to diminish, however, when, first, placental extract and, later, pituitary extract brought about the same symptoms. But he was not yet defeated, for, he writes, "mine was supposed to be a new hormone and (who knew?) perhaps the pituitary could also manufacture this one."
Next, however, he injected the extract of kidney, spleen and numerous other organs, all of which produced the same effect. He was baffled. In a last ditch effort to clarify these bizarre results, he injected a toxic liquid, Formalin, (used in the preparation of tissues for microscopic study) and when even it produced these symptoms, he knew he had failed in discovering a new hormone.
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