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The news media were quick to grab onto the story yesterday about brain trauma causing problems that resemble the debilitations caused by ALS because of the suggestion that perhaps Lou Gehrig did not actually have ALS, which has come to be known in this country as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”. This possibility, by the way, is not actually mentioned in the study, and there is absolutely no evidence that Gehrig suffered from the type of brain trauma being studied rather than ALS, but the media LOVES a good headline better than it loves any actual semblance of reporting the real story. Witness the insanity of the “Ground Zero Mosque” story.
Anyway, I wanted to make the humble suggestion that if it is ever determined that Lou Gehrig did not have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis then the term “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” be retired right alongside his #4 in Yankee Stadium and that it henceforth be remembered as “Stephen Hawking’s Disease”. Hawking suffers from a motor neurone disease that is a variant of ALS, which was first diagnosed in 1963, when he was 21. His slow degeneration is very atypical; Tony Judt, who died two weeks ago, had been diagnosed with ALS in 2008, and the usual prognosis for someone with ALS is 3-5 years. But I think it’s worth arguing that Hawking’s perseverance in his groundbreaking theoretical work and his visibility as a user of adaptive technology and role model for others with debilitating diseases have been much longer-lived and widely known than the achievements of Gehrig. That’s not to diminish Gehrig’s legacy as an athlete at all, nor to try to limit Hawking’s deserved recognition to just his illness, but to recognize that as the first man helped to define public understanding of this horrible disease, so has the second one helped the public to see that even the severest limitation can be transcended.
