Hans Selye

Selye began his career making a mistake and ended it having founded a field. In 1936, injecting rats with ovarian extracts in search of a new hormone, he noticed that the rats developed the same pattern of damage regardless of what he injected. The specific agent did not matter. The body was responding to the fact of being challenged, not to the nature of the challenge. He called this universal response the General Adaptation Syndrome and spent the next four decades demonstrating that it operates with the regularity of a physical law: alarm, resistance, exhaustion, in that sequence, whether the stressor is heat or surgery or a deadline or a decade of AI-augmented overwork. His 1974 coinage of eustress—the stress that produces growth—supplied the distinction that the present AI debate most needs and most lacks: the difference between the builder whose intensity is the growth response functioning as it