Stephen Hawking (33 page)

To many, Hawking is not the hero the public seems to have made him. There are those who suggest that he is melodramatic at conferences, that he is pretentious and showy, that his constant questioning is affected and deliberately argumentative.

The physicist and popular writer Paul Davies pointed out that there could be few things more intimidating than for Hawking to come crashing through the doors of a lecture theater five minutes after an inexperienced speaker has begun to talk. Even worse were the occasions when he decided to leave before the end of a lecture and went careering along the aisle, accelerating his motorized wheelchair straight toward the swing doors at the back of the room. But Davies admits:

Often, it is simply that Stephen is hungry or has remembered that he must phone someone urgently. His lateness is always unintentional and not done to intimidate, but fortunately it hasn't happened to me—yet!

There are those who do not view Hawking's antics and celebrity so kindly. One theorist has been quoted as saying,
“He's working on the same things everybody else is. He just receives a lot of attention because of his condition.”
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Do Hawking's critics have a point, or are such statements simply sour grapes over the hype surrounding him? Hawking's own opinion on people comparing him with Einstein is typically brash: “You shouldn't believe everything you read,” he says with an ambiguous smile.
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Finishing the first draft took up most of 1984. It was the year a bomb planted in the Grand Hotel in Brighton nearly killed the British Cabinet, and the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her own bodyguards in the garden of her New Delhi home.

As the months passed and Hawking juggled his commitments, the manuscript grew and the stack of correspondence with his editor expanded apace. In the world at large, a baboon's heart was transplanted into a fifteen-day-old baby, Bishop Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize, and toward the close of the year Ronald Reagan was reelected as U.S. president.

The first draft of the manuscript was completed by Christmas, and work on rewrites began in the New Year. The exchange of letters between Hawking in Cambridge and Guzzardi in Manhattan became even more frenetic as the deadline approached.

The trade press got wind of the book soon after Christmas 1984 but appeared to be nonplussed by seemingly misplaced enthusiasm at Bantam:

Is it the imminence of spring, or is the new enthusiasm we detect genuine? Everywhere we hear the sound of feet jumping up and down in sheer elation over some pet project. At Bantam, Peter Guzzardi is jumping for joy over the acquisition of Stephen Hawking's
From the Big Bang to Black Holes
. . . . Paying what Guzzardi calls “significant six figures, definitely above $100,000,” Bantam has plans to publish the book in hardcover “sometime in 1986.” . . . “It's a great book to have,” enthuses Peter. “Hawking is on the cutting edge of what we know about the cosmos. This whole business of the unified field theory, the conjunction of relativity with quantum mechanics, is comparable to the search for the Holy Grail.”
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The mid-eighties were indeed a time of growing optimism. As the major nations of the world dragged themselves out of recession, markets began to expand and all sectors of business were on the up. It was the era of the yuppie. The “city slicker” emerged metamorphosed from the post-hippy hibernation of the seventies, cast off the clinging remnants of introspection and integrity, and jumped into a Porsche 911 convertible.

Newly elected right-wing governments were in power in the major industrialized nations, and you could almost smell the odor of growing confidence in the spring air. Life was good; no one had noticed the swelling bass note of overexpansion and downturn. Share prices in champagne and designer labels rocketed, and big publishing deals became part of the norm.

In July 1985, Hawking decided to spend some time at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research in
Geneva. There he could continue with his fundamental research and also allow himself time to devote to what he described to friends as “a popular book.” He rented an apartment in the city where he was looked after by a full-time nurse and his research assistant at the time, a French Canadian named Raymond Laflamme. Jane, in the meantime, had decided to tour Germany to visit friends. The couple planned to meet up in Bayreuth to attend the Wagner Festival in August, after Stephen had completed the rewrites for the book.

One evening at the beginning of August, Hawking retired to bed late after a long day making corrections to the manuscript. His nurse helped him into bed and sat down to relax in an adjoining room. After finishing a magazine article, she would begin her routine of checking her patient every half-hour throughout the night. Around 3
A.M.
, the nurse walked into Hawking's room to find him awake and having problems breathing. His face had turned violet, and he was making a gurgling sound in his throat. She immediately alerted Laflamme, and an ambulance was called.

Hawking was rushed to the Cantonal Hospital in Geneva, where he was immediately put on a ventilator. Legend has it that it was thanks to television that the doctor in charge of receiving the crippled scientist at the hospital saved Hawking's life. Shortly before Hawking had become one of his patients, he had just happened to watch a TV program about a Cambridge physicist who suffered from ALS. Knowing Hawking's condition, he knew which drugs he could and could not give to his patient. A doctor who had not been fortunate enough to catch the program may well have killed him unintentionally.

Hawking was rushed to intensive care, and the authorities at CERN were notified. The division leader, Dr. Maurice Jacob, arrived at the hospital before dawn and was informed that things were touch and go. It was thought that Hawking had suffered a blockage in his windpipe and was suspected of having contracted pneumonia. ALS sufferers are more susceptible to the disease than others; in many cases it proves to be fatal. Maurice Jacob and his staff immediately tried to contact Jane, but that proved no easy matter. She was traveling from city to city and had left a series of telephone numbers with Stephen's nurse. The problem was that no one was absolutely sure of her schedule. Frantic calls were made to various private numbers in Germany, until she was finally tracked down at a friend's house near Bonn.

Jane arrived at the Cantonal Hospital to find her husband in a very bad way. He was on a life-support machine but at least was out of immediate danger. However, in the opinion of the doctors, he would have little hope of survival without a tracheostomy operation. Stephen was unable to breathe through his mouth or nose and would suffocate if he were taken off the ventilator that stood beside his hospital bed. The operation involved slicing into the windpipe and implanting a breathing device in his neck, just above collar level. Jane was told that the operation was essential to save her husband's life, but there was a major snag. If they went ahead, he would never be able to speak or make any vocal sound again.

What was she to do? The decision could come only from her. Although Stephen had hardly been capable of speech for many years, with only his family and close friends able to understand him, there was now the prospect of total loss of
communication. His voice may have been difficult to understand, but it was still speech. There was, she knew, a technique for recovering some speech after a tracheostomy, but that was a possibility only if the patient was reasonably fit. The doctors around her were staggered that a man in Hawking's state could still be traveling the world, but there would be no chance of his regaining any form of speech in his physical condition. Could she take the decision to go ahead with it and condemn her husband to silence?

The future looked very, very bleak. We didn't know how we were going to be able to survive—or if he was going to survive. It was my decision for him to have a tracheostomy. But I have sometimes thought, what have I done? What sort of life have I let him in for?
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After the operation, Hawking remained in the Swiss hospital for another two weeks. An air ambulance then returned him to Cambridge, where he was admitted to Addenbrooke's Hospital. The plane flew in to Marshall's Airport, where he was met by doctors and escorted to the intensive care unit at the hospital.

That evening the senior nurse of the medical unit at Addenbrooke's was quoted in the
Cambridge Evening
News
as saying, “He is going into intensive care. We are not sure of his condition and he needs to be assessed.”
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In the event, he was to spend a further few weeks in the hospital in Cambridge before he was allowed home to West Road.

In many respects, Hawking had been lucky once again. He had survived by the skin of his teeth. Many ALS sufferers
die from pneumonia initiated by their condition. When he caught the infection, he just happened to be in one of the most medically advanced countries in the world; he was received at the hospital by a doctor who had recently seen him on TV and knew of his condition; and he had the support of an intelligent, caring wife. However, one of the most serendipitous facts of all is that, if he had contracted pneumonia two years earlier, things would have been far worse.

In August 1985, the writing of what would become the best-selling
A Brief History of Time
was almost complete. Peter Guzzardi had, of course, been notified immediately that Stephen had fallen ill and had continued editing the manuscript while Hawking was recovering in the hospital. The family had received some money from the advance and could just about cope financially with the immediate crisis. The problem for Jane, however, was what would happen in the long term. After the tracheostomy, Stephen would need around-the-clock nursing. The best the National Health Service could offer was seven hours' nursing help a week in the Hawkings' home, plus two hours' help with bathing. They would have to pay for private nursing. The advance from the book would not last long, and there was absolutely no certainty about its eventual success. To Jane there seemed little long-term hope. How were they to survive if he could never work again?

There were few possibilities. She would willingly have left her own career and devoted herself full-time to looking after her husband, but she was not a qualified nurse; and, in any case, who would then provide for the family? The alternative was the dreaded thought of Stephen in a nursing home, unable to work, slipping into gradual decline and eventual
death. “There were days when I felt sometimes I could not go on because I didn't know how to cope,”
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Jane has said of that period.

It was obvious they would have to find financial support from somewhere. Jane wrote letter after letter to charitable organizations around the world and called upon the help of family friends in approaching institutions that might be interested in assisting them. Help arrived from an American foundation aware of Hawking's work and international reputation, which agreed to pay £50,000 a year toward the costs of nursing. Shortly afterward, several other charitable organizations on both sides of the Atlantic followed suit with smaller donations. Jane feels bitter about the whole affair. She resents the fact that, after paying a lifetime of contributions to the National Health Service, they were offered such meager help when the need arose. She is very aware that if her husband had been an unknown physics teacher, he would now be living out his final days in a residential home. “Think of the waste of talent,”
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she has said of the situation.

The very month in which the Hawkings received the offer of financial support, a computer expert living in California, Walt Woltosz, sent Stephen a program he had written called Equalizer. It was compatible with the computers he used at home and in the office and enabled him to select words on a screen from a menu of three thousand. He could move from word to word by squeezing a switch held in his hand. Tiny movements of his fingers were enough to operate the device and move a cursor to the desired word. When a sentence had been built up, it could be sent to a voice synthesizer that then spoke for him. Certain key sentences were pre-programmed
into the computer to speed up the process, and with a little practice Hawking found he could manage about ten words a minute. “It was a bit slow,” he has said, “but then I think slowly, so it suited me quite well.”
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