[Selye pioneered the stress concept that is ingrained in the vocabulary of daily life. This was originally build on experimental observations that divers noxious agents can trigger a similar triad of endocrine (adrenal enlargement), immune (involution of thymus) and gut (gastric erosion formation) responses as reported in a letter to Nature in 1936. Subsequently, he articulated the underlying mechanisms and hypothesized the existence of a “first mediator” in the hypothalamus able to orchestrate this bodily changes. However he took two generations to identify this mediator. The Nobel Laureate, Roger Guillemin, a former Selye’s PhD student, demonstrated in 1955 the existence of a hypothalamic factor that elicited adrenocorticotropic hormone release from the rat pituitary and named it corticotropin releasing factor (CRF). In 1981, Wylie Vale, a former Guillemin’s Ph Student, characterized CRF as 41 amino acid and cloned the CRF1 and CRF2 receptors. This paves the way to experimental studies establishing that the activation of the CRF signaling pathways in the brain plays a key role in mediating the stress-related endocrine, behavioral, autonomic and visceral responses. The unraveling of the biochemical coding of stress is rooted in Selye legacy continues to have increasing impact on the scientific community.]

[This article is a short personal recollection of Dr. Hans Selye (HS) and of his institute in order to show, first, why and how he influenced us; second, who he was as a person, human being, physician, scientist, professor, mentor; third, what was the structure and functioning of the Institut de mèdecine et chirurgie expèrimentales (IMCE) and fourth, what HS’ contributions and accomplishments were.]

[Identification of etiological connections among virtually distinct diseases in a patient may be sometimes challenging. We report a unique case with two B cell malignancies and an inflammatory leukoencephalopathy. Three days prior to admission, the elderly male patient developed fatigue, headaches, recurrent vomiting, memory disturbances, depression and somnolence. Clinical, laboratory and imaging evaluations as well as post mortem histological studies were performed. Simultaneous presence of primary central nervous system B cell lymphoma, temporal lobe inflammatory leukoencephalopathy and multiple (smoldering) myeloma, was revealed by the detailed work up in the treatmentnaïve patient. Based on recent data from genomic studies, we propose that a sequential evolution of molecular pathology lead to the co-occurrence of multiple myeloma and primary central nervous system B cell lymphoma in this patient, and interpret the development of the temporal lobe leukoencephalopathy as a likely paraneoplastic complication of smoldering myeloma.]