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11 - Maian mechanisms for hormesis and catch-up growth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2011

Tony Stebbing
Affiliation:
Plymouth Marine Laboratory
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Summary

What is hormesis and why haven't we heard about it before?

Leonard Sagan (1985)

The hormetic model is not an exception to the rule – it is the rule.

Calabrese and Baldwin (2003)

HORMESIS IN RECENT TIMES

The first meeting on radiation hormesis was held in California in August 1985. Although I had not worked on radiation hormesis, I had published a review a few years earlier, which included examples of radiation hormesis. This was an attempt to put over the idea that hormesis was a general phenomenon that I believed would be shown to have a general explanation. So I had deliberately included in the review examples of hormesis that were as diverse as could be found. They encompassed a wide range, including different toxic agents and organisms from many phyla, some showing the hormetic effects of radiation. The examples chosen were all of growth hormesis, because that was my interest, although the reader should appreciate that hormesis occurs in a number of other biological processes as well, from the fields of biochemistry, physiology, behaviour and others. The examples of growth hormesis from the literature had been published in many different forms, so in my review they were plotted in the same way, showing that they matched the β-curve. Even the examples exhibiting radiation hormesis ranged from bacteria and protozoans to insects and guinea pigs, although the majority were due to low levels of other toxic agents of the form characterised by the β-curve (Figure 10.1).

Type
Chapter
Information
A Cybernetic View of Biological Growth
The Maia Hypothesis
, pp. 266 - 291
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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