Stress and My Life

Abstract

Hans Selye, the father of stress concept has never really defined stress. The best he could do was to say that stress induced a general adaptation syndrome. Adapted animals resisted stress [1]. However, stress also had to do with disease and this was the aspect which Selye emphasized since 1955, when he published in Science the article Stress and disease [2]. Apparently if stress was causing disease it was highly fundable by granting agencies. So I herd about this aspect of stress only in the Selye Institute and this has been transmitted to the public conscience, as well. Nowadays people are “stressed out” when things are going really bad. Selye saw the thymus shrink, but in those days he had no knowledge of what the thymus was doing. It was not known either what the spleen was doing or that the pituitary gland was connected to the hypothalamus. Despite of these difficulties he was very sure of the significance of his findings on stress. I was in his laboratory in 1966–67. By that time I was an Immunologist and prior to coming to Canada, I worked as a Research Fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The function of the thymus has been just elucidated a few years earlier by Miller in 1962 [3]. It was shown to be a central immune organ of generating thymus derived (T) lymphocytes. T lymphocytes were characterized as important in immunoregulation and in cell mediated and humoral immunity. That the spleen contains antibody producing