Now consider a case when the poisonous substance, in some dose, makes youbetter off overall, one step up from robustness. Hormesis, a word coined bypharmacologists, is when a small dose of a harmful substance is actuallybeneficial for the organism, acting as medicine. A little bit of an otherwiseoffending substance, not too much, acts to benefit the organism and make itbetter overall as it triggers some overreaction. This was not interpreted at thetime in the sense of “gains from harm” so much as “harm is dose dependent” or“medicine is dose dependent.” The interest to scientists has been in thenonlinearity of the dose-response.