What happened to stephen hawking neck

Justin Yerbury is a world leader in motor neurone disease (MND) research . Two years ago, he began to develop symptoms of the disease himself and by the end of last year his condition was critical. Using eye-gaze technology to type, he describes here the encounter that inspired him to undergo drastic medical intervention.

As we stood on the doorstep waiting for someone to answer the bell, I wondered what he would be like. I wondered what we would talk about, or what I should ask him. My girls and I were a bundle of nerves and I was pinching myself to make sure this was really happening.

We had been cautioned that the reality of meeting Stephen Hawking was far from his polished appearances on TV and that his current condition could be confronting. Despite the warnings and the awkward initial introductions, he was engaging and genuinely interested in the conversations we were having, seated around his dining table.

He gave me a rundown of the milestones of his motor neurone disease, from his diagnosis to using a wheelchair and then the tracheostomy. He was very engaged and very witty. I explained to him how hard it was to tell people how bad motor neurone disease is when he had lived with it for more than 50 years. He appreciated the irony.

Stephen was diagnosed with MND in his 20s, so each step had been a slow adjustment for him. But MND usually takes hold in a matter of years, not decades, as it has in my experience. I was inspired by Stephen's attitude and cheekiness after living with this insidious disease for so long.

At the meeting, I felt that I was in a decent condition, although my right arm was totally paralysed and my left had lost significant strength.

My condition worsened rapidly after that trip to Cambridge and by the end of last year I was unable to walk and relying heavily on ventilation. My doctors predicted that I woul

Specifically, using the TRPMS, the researchers were able to distinguish between two competing theories of the origins of the disease. ALS begins as weakness and stiffness in the muscles, eventually affecting all voluntary muscles in the body, causing difficulty in speaking, moving and breathing. About 10% of the people with ALS have an underlying genetic cause, such as a mutation in the enzyme superoxide dismutase. However, in most cases, ALS occurs spontaneously in people with no family history of the disease. ALS is marked by the death of motor neurons in both the central and peripheral nervous systems. In a clinical setting, a transcranial magnetic stimulator is used to probe the health of cortical motor neurons. When the noninvasive device is placed on the head and switched on, it generates strong magnetic fields that stimulate the motor cortex. This induced cortical activity in turn evokes electric signals, called motor-evoked potentials, in the muscles. Thus, a change in the amplitude of the motor-evoked potential reflects a change in the activity of the motor cortex, that is, lower activity would indicate that neurons have died due to the disease. Previous studies using transcranial stimulation have shown that during the early stages of ALS, cortical motor neurons let out a final gasp of increased electrical activity before dying. This hyperexcitability causes a commensurate increase in the intensity of motor-evoked potentials in the muscles of the hand. Although useful in disease prognosis, transcranial magnetic stimulation is not always a reliable indicator of the extent of cortical motor neuron damage. “The motor-evoked potential amplitude even in normal subjects can be very variable,” said Helekar. “The same stimulation conducted multiple times can give different results, so we wanted to see if we can get consistent results with our device which uses weaker but more focu

When Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1963, few thought he would live more than a couple of years.

At the time he was diagnosed, Professor Hawking asked a question often posed when people are diagnosed with a terminal illness — why me?

He wrote about this in his memoir, My Brief History.

"I felt it was very unfair — why should this happen to me?

"At the time, I thought my life was over and that I would never realise the potential I felt I had."

But Professor Hawking lived decades longer than he, or many medical experts, expected that he would.

How Hawking's disease progressed

Professor Hawking had just turned 21 when he was diagnosed with a very rare slow-progressing form of ALS, a form of motor neurone disease (MND).

He was at the end of his time at Oxford when he started to notice early signs of his disease. He was getting more clumsy and fell over several times without knowing why.

An extraordinary life in pictures

From zero-gravity chambers to the premiere of a film about his life, look back at Stephen Hawking's life in pictures.

In comments published in a 2002 British Medical Journal article close to his 60th birthday, Professor Hawking recalled going to hospital for medical tests.

"I was in for two weeks, during which I had a wide variety of tests. After all that, they didn't tell me what I had, except that it was not multiple sclerosis, and that I was an atypical case.

"I gathered, however, that they expected it to continue to get worse, and that there was nothing they could do, except give me vitamins.

"I could see that they didn't expect them to have much effect. I didn't feel like asking for more details, because they were obviously bad.

"The realisation that I had an incurable disease that was likely to kill me in a few years was a bit of a shock."

The

Stephen Hawking first met Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, at a conference in 1997. Moore noticed that Hawking's computer, which he used to communicate, had an AMD processor and asked him if he preferred instead a "real computer" with an Intel micro-processor. Intel has been providing Hawking with customized PCs and technical support since then, replacing his computer every two years.

Hawking lost his ability to speak in 1985, when, on a trip to CERN in Geneva, he caught pneumonia. In the hospital, he was put on a ventilator. His condition was critical. The doctors asked Hawking's then-wife, Jane, whether they should turn off the life support. She vehemently refused. Hawking was flown to Addenbrooke's Hospital, in Cambridge, where the doctors managed to contain the infection. To help him breathe, they also performed a tracheotomy, which involved cutting a hole in his neck and placing a tube into his windpipe. As a result, Hawking irreversibly lost the ability to speak.

For a while, Hawking communicated using a spelling card, patiently indicating letters and forming words with a lift of his eyebrows. Martin King, a physicist who had been working with Hawking on a new communication system, contacted a California-based company called Words Plus, whose computer program Equalizer allowed the user to select words and commands on a computer using a hand clicker. King spoke to the CEO of Words Plus, Walter Woltosz, and asked if the software could help a physics professor in England with ALS. Woltosz had created an earlier version of Equalizer to help his mother-in-law, who also suffered from ALS and had lost her ability to speak and write. "I asked if it was Stephen Hawking, but he couldn't give me a name without permission," says Woltosz. "He called me the next day and confirmed it. I said I would donate whatever was needed."

Equalizer first ran on an Apple II computer linked to a speech synthesizer made by a com