Hormesis: The dose response for the 21st century: The future has arrived.

Dose-response is the backbone of toxicology, and one of the most debated scientific issues over the 20th century. It was in the last century that the scientific community applauded the discovery of the proportionality rule, so called linear non-threshold dose-response relationship. It was also in the same century that all the regulatory standards were framed around threshold and linear non-threshold models. At the same time, hormesis was a marginalized dose-response relationship often viewed as the extreme values of a data distribution in a Box and Whiskers plot. However, an analysis of bibliometric data indicates that the future has arrived, and hormesis is now revolutionizing toxicology and most research areas of biology. Hormesis celebrates its rebirth some 150 years after its discovery.