Hawking

"At the end of January 1963, 21-year-old Stephen Hawking (author of the international best seller A Brief History of Time) stood in a consulting room on the third floor of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He looked out on the snow-covered street below, listening in silence to the carefully chosen words of the hospital’s senior neurologist. In two years, the doctor slowly explained, Stephen would be dead. He had been diagnosed with ALS - amyotrophic latereral sclerosis, or motor neurone disease.