‘Stephen Hawking’ memoir salutes the indomitable human spirit (Book Review)

By Vishnu Makhijani New Delhi, Nov 7 : Stephen Hawking was just 21 when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease of the motor neurons that almost always causes death within two to five years after diagnosis, with only one in 20 patients living for 20 or more years.
He lived with it for 55 years and is noted for his breakthrough research on black holes, described as “some of the strangest and most fascinating objects in outer space” – and seminal books like “A Brief History of Time” and co-author of “The Grand Design”.
He was confined to a wheelchair for the major portion of his life, with a “peg” inserted in his belly through which his “carers” injected fluids and vitamins — he took 80 pills a day — directly into his stomach and fed him through an oversized spoon. He communicated through a speech-generating device, using a single cheek muscle to type out words and sentences on a computer.
A lesser mortal would have long thrown in the towel but not Hawking, as Leonard Mlodinow, himself a theoretical physicist and co-author of “The Grand Design”, writes in “Stephen Hawking — A Memoir of Friendship and Physics” (Allen Lane/Penguin Random House) — a heart-warming saga of what a human being can achieve, no matter what the odds.
“After his diagnosis, it took about a year of intense emotional struggle for Stephen to come to grips with is fate. In defining an ever-growing universe of physical activities he could not do, his disease magnified the value of the mental activities he could. It left him with a choice of wasting away in spirit as well as body or finding a world of the mind in which he could still function. Where some in his situation would have found God, Stephen found physics. He decided to finish his Ph. D. (from Cambridge). He found to his surprise, that he liked the work,” writes Mlodinow, who closely worked with Hawking for 11 years on (the condensed) “A Briefer History of Time” and “The Grand Design”.
Hawking’s career started after his doctoral dissertation, written in 1966, when he was 24.