two friends are hoping to turn her legacynto funding for care and research into lou gehrig's disease.e is c 7's carolyn johnson. >> jennifer and alexa mtinez are training for a bike ride that wl take them 100 miles and every push of the pedal is inspired by the memory of a friend. >> superior, amazing woman within the most pain i ever saw. if she can do it, i can do anythi. i can ride 300 miles. >> reporter: the twore raising money fight als, also known as lou gehrig's disease in honor of carla zilbersmith. >> she never shied away from anything. this is a big thing to ride 100 miles. a ls is a lot harder than riding 100 miles. we want to d it in honor of her. >> reporr: she first revealed her dinosis to a live audience in 2008. >> i was diagnosed with lou gehrig's disease, which sucks because i hate baseball. [ laughter ] >> reporter: we caught up with her earlier this year when she was launching an als fundraising effort am her own, convincing fell als patients to pose for this movie themed calendar. >> theneed lots of money for research. >> reporter: s lost her battle with als in ma

. >> lou gehrig's disease s people older. patrick was diagnosed when he was 30.fe span was two to ffve years, but inssead of wallowing in pity, he got to work. >> documenting everything, no maater how personal, or at times life threatening. his sister wendy recalls when oneenight they had to call for an ambulance, because e was not >> so i am documenting him, of course i am crying. and he is like turn the camera and i am not like i am not turning it round. and that's the kind of crazy guy he is. >> wendy remembers when they first got the news he had a.l.s.. they were rooting for another fftal disease. >> we were hoping for,,you know, hiv. hoping forranything, you knoo, that would not be this. >> because this methodically kills the motor nnurons in your body until you cannot mmve them any more. and any of them. >> he edittd one of the shortt3 gestures in his thumb. then another with the eyebrow. now he is using just eye balls. patrick to move a cursor ands communicate, eventually, when i asked him about the film prooress it takes him a few minutes to type just one

he has a.l.s., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as lou gehrig's disease.ericans have a.l.s. at any given time. and like watters, they all will die, most within five years, as their nervous system gradually disconnects from their muscles. >> steven watters: everything just takes a little longer. i just set things up to where it requires minimal manual effort. just handling personal hygiene is difficult-- teeth brushing, flossing, very difficult, time- consuming. so you just make the adaptations that you can and go on. >> pelley: eventually, watters will be able to move nothing but his eyes. the same fate is ahead of michael martin, who also has a.l.s. martin has nearly lost any ability to speak, and very soon, he won't be able to walk. i wonder what it was that your regular doctor back home told you about your disease and what your prospects were. >> michael martin: he said i had about two years. >> pelley: you had about two years to live. no patient has ever been cured of a.l.s. no patient has ever seen the symptoms reversed, even temporarily. but still, d

lou gehrig's disease it is another very debilitating disease. and it leads to loss of voluntary movement control and eventually paralysis. >> this is what tony jett suffers from. >> right. so if we look at the behavior of normal flies. normal flys will climb upwards. they have this robust negative geo tactic response but the flys that are defect piv in this human als gene, these flys are alive and they're moving but they can no longer climb. so this is a remarkable example of sort of a fundamental copy or we're mimicking the disease in the fly situation. so of course in the real laboratory we would take a very comprehensive approach to this. so we look at many, many different aspects of what it looks like in the fly to express one of these genes. and we're asking how many features look similar to the human situation so that we can say how well does the fly show the fundamental features of that disease. and so in this situation, we're sort of using the power of conserved pathways and conserved genes in order to approach the really complicated pro

. >> reporter: hawking, our world's most famous scientist, was diagnosed with lou gehrig's disease inw facial movements. >> this explains the mysteries of the universe. but it's cold and unemotional. so, i try not to let it affect my family life. >> reporter: he has three children and one grandchild. how do you read? research? and how long does it take you to actually write? >> scientific papers, i read them online. and i read them on my computer screen. fiction is not to be available in electronics form. so, i like to be read to. i still prefer this. one can now buy it online. writing is very slow. but that gives me time to choose my words carefully. >> reporter: why do so many human beings seem to need a god? >> people want to think there is something they can relate to and which can make them feel they are not isolated, but a part of the larger whole. >> reporter: hawking has no need for a god. but it will take years, generations, centuries, perhaps, for scientists to test his theory, that our world was created by physics alone. now, hawking hasn't always felt this way. but he says

this is lou gehrig's disease. characterized by the progressive loss of motor neurons in the spinal cord, which normally provides a connection between the brain and the muscles of the body. ideally, we would like to find something that stabilizes at these neurons. but how? suppose you could test a library of hundreds of thousands of candidate drug compounds known that some are in their there might be one that would be valuable encouraging motor neurons to survive. that would be a very attractive approach. can we actually do that? i am showing you a video of robots who are doing drugs screenings. this is in a facility in gaithersburg, maryland. this is done in a miniaturized format spirits -- formats. it can save months or years of time. this is not a pipe dream. it is a reality. it is carrying the same kind of experience in harvard fork -- right now. the possibility that stem cell research might one day enable us to identify their before the disease that claimed the life of so many gives you some hope that this new

this is lou gehrig's disease.ssive loss of motor neurons in the spinal cord, which normally provides a connection between the brain and the muscles of the body. ideally, we would like to find something that stabilizes at these neurons. but how? suppose you could test a library of hundreds of thousands of candidate drug compounds known that some are in their there might be one that would be valuable encouraging motor neurons to survive. that would be a very attractive approach. can we actually do that? i am showing you a video of robots who are doing drugs screenings. this is in a facility in gaithersburg, maryland. this is done in a miniaturized format spirits -- formats. it can save months or years of time. this is not a pipe dream. it is a reality. it is carrying the same kind of experience in harvard fork -- right now. the possibility that stem cell research might one day enable us to identify their before the disease that claimed the life of so many gives you some hope that this new application may provide ans