Directed by Stephen Finnigan 1 hour 35 minutes; not rated Normal rules don’t apply to Stephen Hawking, perhaps the most popular cosmologist of the past century. His severe case of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, has trapped his bold mind in an uncooperative body, a circumstance that’s an inseparable part of his fame. Now 71, he’s the rare scientific luminary who’s also a celebrity, thanks to his best-selling book, “A Brief History of Time,” and appearances on comedies like “The Simpsons” and “The Big Bang Theory.” So a normal analysis of the bio-documentary “Hawking” matters little. The movie has the typical mix of interviews and archival pictures, serving mostly linear storytelling, with hardly a frame of surprising or pretty filmmaking. Maybe creativity can take a rest when you’re letting an oddly charismatic genius have his say. The winning approach here is to let the movie be told in Mr. Hawking’s voice, at least his computer-generated one. “Welcome to my world,” he says. In one sequence, software engineers huddle with Mr. Hawking to give him a faster means of communicating (based on facial tics, mostly), but you’d swear he finds a way to put tone in this narration. He tells us about his childhood and his Oxford student days, when his illness was diagnosed; about his first marriage; about his students; about his science. We see him in daily tasks like eating, assisted by caretakers patiently lifting food to his misshapen, passive face. But it’s not his vulnerability that lingers here; it’s his ambition and drive. Mr. Hawking — no shy and retiring genius, he — has star quality that he lets shine, whatever the limitations of its packaging.
Showing posts with label Stephen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen. Show all posts
Monday, 16 September 2013
Stephen Crohn, Who Furthered AIDS Study, Dies at 66
His boyfriend was dying of a disease without a name. Beginning in 1978, Stephen Crohn cared for Jerry Green, a handsome gymnast, as he lost 30 pounds, went blind and was ravaged by the kinds of infections that rarely harmed otherwise healthy people. Mr. Green was one of the first people to die of the disease that became known as AIDS. In the ensuing years, scores of Mr. Crohn’s friends died of it. He had taken no special precautions, and he had been as sexually active as his friends. But he never got sick. Mr. Crohn’s resistance helped lead to a deeper understanding of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and treatments, simply by staying alive and working with doctors to help figure out why he was. “What he contributed to medical knowledge is really quite extraordinary,” said Dr. Bruce D. Walker, the director of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, M.I.T. and Harvard. Mr. Crohn died on Aug. 23 in New York City at 66. The cause was suicide, his sister Amy Crohn Santagata said on Friday in confirming the death, which was not announced at the time. Mr. Crohn’s immune system and its quirks earned him unsought renown. In 1996, the British newspaper The Independent called him “The Man Who Can’t Catch AIDS,” and he told his story in documentary films and newspaper interviews around the world. Mr. Crohn had first come to the attention of Dr. Bill Paxton, then a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York. Dr. Paxton had been looking for gay men who seemed resistant to infection. Working with Dr. David Ho, now the chief executive of the Diamond Center, Dr. Paxton exposed Mr. Crohn’s cells, and those of another promising volunteer, to H.I.V. “I couldn’t infect the CD4 cells,” he said in an interview. “I’d never seen that before.” The CD4 white blood cells, which H.I.V. normally penetrates to start the process of disease, locked out the virus. Even at H.I.V. concentrations thousands of times greater than would be encountered outside a test tube, nothing happened. Years later, researchers isolated the cause. H.I.V. gets into cells by fitting into two receptors on CD4 cells. But thanks to a genetic defect, the second receptor on Mr. Crohn’s CD4 cells was flawed. The malfunctioning receptor, CCR5, had no negative effect on his health and kept H.I.V. from getting in. As he put it in a “Nova” documentary on PBS: “It’s like a key — the virus comes with this. It’s looking for a two-holed keyhole. I don’t have one of the holes. Period. It’s never going to attach to me.” The genetic anomaly, known as the delta 32 mutation, which produces the flawed receptor, is found in less than 1 percent of the population. Stephen Lyon Crohn was born on Sept. 5, 1946, in Manhattan to Richard Crohn (who also had the gene) and the former Janet Goren. He was raised in Dumont, N.J., and was educated at New York University, City College of New York and the Art Students League of New York. He lived in Saugerties, N.Y. Besides Ms. Santagata, Mr. Crohn is survived by two other sisters, Carla Crohn Friedman and Judith Bloom, as well as many nieces and nephews. Mr. Crohn was an artist and worked as a freelance editor for Fodor’s Travel. His paintings, mainly abstract works that evoked landscapes, were exhibited in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere. “My brother saw all his friends around him dying, and he didn’t die,” Ms. Santagata said. “He went through a tremendous amount of survivor guilt about that and said to himself, ‘There’s got to be a reason.’ ” “He was quite extraordinary, and then also quite ordinary,” she said. Mr. Crohn was the great-nephew of Burrill B. Crohn, a leading gastroenterologist who first described the disease that carries his name. Mr. Crohn felt he was carrying on “his family’s tradition” by helping researchers, said Dr. Paxton, now a professor of infection and immunity at the University of Liverpool Institute of Infection and Global Health. The research based on Mr. Crohn’s immune system has led to advances in fighting H.I.V. A drug that blocks the CCR5 receptor, maraviroc, is now used to keep infection from spreading in patients who have contracted the virus. And in 2006, an AIDS patient in Berlin was effectively cured of the disease after receiving bone marrow transplants from a matching donor who had the delta 32 mutation. “This is a classic case of medical science learning from patients,” said Dr. Walker of the Ragon Institute. “Most of the immunology we know comes from studying other animal models,” he said. “We need to study humans who have real diseases.” He explained, “You take the extreme examples and try to see how those people are different from the average person with the disease.” So, he said, Dr. Paxton and colleagues asked, “How is Steve different from the average person with H.I.V. infection? And bingo, they found it.” Dr. Paxton and Mr. Crohn remained friends. “He was the type of guy who walks into the room, and it lights up,” he said. “I was going to call him this weekend.”
Stephen Hawking Looks Back
Stephen Hawking is known for his research into relativity, black holes, and quantum mechanics, as well as for the disease that has left him almost entirely paralyzed. But the theoretical cosmologist says that, were he to start from scratch, he wouldn't focus on physics.
Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.IRA FLATOW, HOST:
What would Stephen Hawking do with his life if he had to do it all over again? Hawking, as you know, was one of the world's most illustrious physicists and science author. And now he's out with a new book, a personal memoir entitled "My Brief History," out this week from Bantam. He doesn't give many interviews as his illness does not allow him to converse in real time, but he did agree to answer a few questions we put to him. And I think some of his responses may surprise you. Let me give you those right now. First, we asked him, are there any mysteries about the universe you think we may never be able to answer, questions beyond the reach of science?
STEPHEN HAWKING: I believe there are no questions that science can't answer about a physical universe. Although we don't yet have the full understanding of the laws of nature, I think we will eventually find a complete unified theory. Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.
FLATOW: We asked him another question - and I think this gave us a really interesting answer. We asked him if you were to start your career over again now, starting now, what would you study and why?
HAWKING: If I were starting research now, I might study molecular biology, the science of life. Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA and the genetic code in 1953. I did not realize its significance in 1957 when I had to choose a science to specialize in. In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.
FLATOW: And finally we asked him what scientific question outside of physics most intrigues you?
HAWKING: The biggest unsolved problem in science, outside physics, is the origin of life. Did it arrive spontaneously on Earth, and if so how, or did it come from another planet on a meteorite?
FLATOW: Stephen Hawking, director of research at the Center for a Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge, author of a new book, "My Brief History."
(SOUNDBITE OF IRA FLATOW READING SHOW CREDITS)
FLATOW: If you missed any part of our program, go back, go to our website and go to our, you know, podcast. You can send all your devices over there to listen. Also, our videos are up there - hundreds of them for you to download and enjoy. And if you like us, like us on Facebook and continue a weeklong discussion on Twitter: @SciFri. You can also email us: SciFri@ScienceFriday.com. I'm ira Flatow in New York.
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