E Calabrese and LA Baldwin
Chemical hormesis: its historical foundations as a biological hypothesis
Human Exp Toxicol, 2000, 19: 2-31
Despite the long history of hormesis-related experimental research, no systematic effort to describe its early hystory has been undertaken. The present paper attempts to reconstruct and asses the early history of such research and to evaluate how advances in related scientific fields affected the course of hormesis-related research. The purpose of this paper is not only to satisfy this gap in current knowledge, but also to provide a foundation for the assessment of how the concept of horpetic dose-response relationship may have affected the nature of bioassay especially with respect to hazard assessment practices within a modern risk assessment framework.
