Monthly Archives: September 2009

As an undergraduate at Oxford University, Stephen William Hawking was a wise guy, a provocateur. He was popular, a lively coxswain for the crew team. Physics came easy. He slept through lectures, seldom studied, and criticized his professors. That all changed when he started graduate school at Cambridge in 1962 and subsequently learned that he had only a few years to live.

The symptoms first appeared while Hawking was still at Oxford. He could not row a scull as easily as he once had; he took a few bad, clumsy falls. A college doctor told him not to drink so much beer. By 1963 his condition had gotten bad enough that his mother brought him to a hospital in London, where he received the devastating diagnosis: motor neuron disease, as ALS is called in the United Kingdom. The prognosis was grim and final: rapid wasting of nerves and muscles, near-total paralysis, and death from respiratory failure in three to five years.