wow. someone is trying to kill Stephen Hawking. that's messed up.
also, hello, Munchausen Sydrome by Proxy. That's a new one.

Police Probe 'Assault' on Scientist Stephen Hawking
Mon Jan 19, 8:49 AM ET Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!


By Astrid Zweynert

LONDON (Reuters) - British police are investigating an alleged assault on scientist Stephen Hawking, the disabled cosmologist and author of the best-selling "A Brief History of Time."

Detectives want to question Hawking about a number of minor injuries he recently suffered.
A Cambridgeshire Police spokeswoman said Monday detectives were probing allegations that the university professor had been assaulted.

"Police are investigating an allegation of assault on a 62-year-old man from Cambridge," the spokeswoman said, declining to give further details.

Hawking, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, is confined to a wheelchair after contracting motor neurone disease, a muscle-wasting condition, when he was 21. He can only speak through a computerized voice synthesizer.

The Daily Mirror reported Monday that Hawking's three children feared he might be the victim of someone suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a disease where sufferers harm others to draw attention to themselves.

"The family are worried sick. They've been suspicious for some time that someone has been harming Stephen," an unnamed source told the newspaper.

The inquiry was triggered when nursing staff contacted police last summer after the professor was left stranded in his wheelchair in the garden of his home on the hottest day of the year and suffered severe heatstroke and sunburn, the Mirror said.

Hawking, 62, achieved international prominence in 1988 with A Brief History of Time, which examined the origin of the universe and was translated into 30 languages.

*thanks for the update, astrid...*