Stephen Hawking: I nearly died
PROFESSOR Stephen Hawking was so close to death while writing A Brief History Of Time that doctors offered to turn off his life support machine.
The physicist developed pneumonia in 1985. But his first wife Jane refused the offer and demanded that doctors in Switzerland return him to Cambridge.
The 71-year-old motor neurone disease sufferer says in a new film: “The doctors thought I was so far gone that they offered Jane [the option] to turn off the machine.”