Hans Selye (1907-1982) was a Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist who wrote over 1700 research papers and seven books, mostly detailing biological stress. Selye is most famous for the theory of the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) which shows that an organism goes through 3 distinct stages of stress: alarm, resistance and exhaustion. He also discovered the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis as one of the boy's primary ways of responding to and dealing with stress.
Selye was born in Vienna on 26 January 1907. He became a Doctor of Medicine and Chemistry in Prague in 1929, went to John's Hopkins Univerisity in 1931 and then went to McGill University in Montreal where he started researching the issue of stress. His book “The Stress of Life” appeared in Hungarian as “Az Életünk és a stressz” in 1964 and becoming a bestseller.