Lou Gehrig's Deadly Legacy

“Along with Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente, Lou Gehrig is among an elite order of baseball players who slipped the bounds of the game and altered the world outside its lines. As Cal Ripken eclipses Gehrig's most famous accomplishment, it's worth recollecting that Gehrig's consecutive-game streak ended for only one reason: The Iron Horse was suffering from a fatal disease”(“Gehrig’s Legacy”).

We can never know how many games Gehrig might have played had he not been killed, 17 days before his 38th birthday, by Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), an illness that results in complete muscular deterioration and for which there is still no known cure. Today 5,000 new cases of Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS has come to be known, are diagnosed in the U.S. each year (Travis). Victims, including Senator Jacob Javits and jazz musician Charles Mingus, died within two to five years. Lou Gehrig was born a poor German immigrant, taciturn by nature. ALS is a neurodegenerativ...