The Society for Acquired Resilience was established in 2019. A group of like-minded colleagues established the infrastructure for an independent learned society, committed to the concept of acquired resilience as an evidence-based feature of animal evolution and, in a medical context, to explore its potential for optimising human ageing.
Drawing on concepts already in the peer-reviewed literature – hormesis, the adaptive cell response, the unfolded protein response – as well as on more ‘popular’ understanding of the healthfulness of exercise, certain diets, weight control and caloric restriction, which in turn have tested ancient traditions of ‘traditional’ medicine – the concept of acquired resilience unifies wide bodies of literature in a simple hypothesis: tissues can be made more resilient by the activation of pathways evolved in plants and animals in response to the stresses of everyday life – exercise (to chase prey or flee predators), hunger (a constant in the lives of wild animals), exposure to the sun, the toxins developed by the plants we eat specifically to discourage our predation on them.
Excess of all these stresses is toxic – exhaustion, starvation, sunburn and sunlight-induced cancers, poisoning. The pathways of stress-induced resilience have evolved to enhance our survival in a world full of stress; to increase the range of plants we can eat, to withstand radiation, to endure hunger until we can find food.