Hans Selye

János Hugo Bruno "Hans" Selye, CC (/ˈhænz ˈsɛljeɪ/; Hungarian: Selye János; January 26, 1907 – October 16, 1982), was a pioneering Austrian-Canadian endocrinologist of Hungarian origin. He conducted much 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.

Biography

Selye was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on 26 January 1907. He grew up in Komárom, Hungary and the Hungarian language university in that town bears his name. He became a Doctor of Medicine and Chemistry in Prague in 1929, went to Johns Hopkins University on a Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship in 1931 and then went to McGill University in Montreal where he started researching the issue of stress in 1936. In 1945, he joined the Université de Montréal where he had 40 assistants and worked with 15,000 laboratory animals. Kantha (1992), in a survey of an elite group of scientists who have authored over 1,000 research publications, identified Selye as one who had published 1,700 research papers, 15 monographs, and 7 popular books. He died on 16 October 1982 in Montreal, Canada. He was a nominee to the Nobel prize for the first time in 1949.