Today, I was buying my books for the semester at graduate school, and in the bookstore was a young man who was a quadriplegic doing the same thing. He had a power wheel chair that he controlled by blowing into a tube. While he still needed help from an assistant, he had the ability to move himself. This is an important amount of independence which would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago.

It made me think about a few things. My great-grandfather, George Runkle, was a telegrapher, and lost a lot of money in penny-stock scams. He lived in many places in the South, finally settling in Washington, D.C. He married and had four children. I know, big deal. Well, he couldn't walk either. We don't know if it was a hereditary handicap, or possibly polio that struck him. However, the technology of the telegraph allowed him to work. Having a good job allowed him to support himself and a family.

If you go back two generations from great-grandpop, to my more distant ancestor, George Runkle, things were different. In his time, if you were physically disabled for any reason, you depended on charity of relatives, or the community. Often times it would mean both. Relatives would bring you out to beg every day. Working for a living, and being able to marry were out of the question.

Last summer, my younger son, Jay, spent a vacation at Bethany Beach going up and down the boardwalk with his brother, George. We explored the Ocean City boardwalk, and took a few other side trips. None of this is remarkable, except Jay can't walk either. He has a hereditary handicap. However, with the power wheelchair he uses, one controlled by a joystick and microprocessor, he can go almost anywhere on his own. The technology liberates him.

Where would we be without Steven Hawking? Ravaged by ALS, he is almost completely paralyzed. A voice synthesizer, however, allows him to communicate his ideas. The technology is allowing Hawking to develop the Grand Unification Theory, and communicate it to us all.

Many years ago, at a time unknown, our ancestors were born hairless. That is a serious handicap in the wild. Skin is exposed to sun; there is no insulation from cold or wet weather, and no protection from blowing sand and dirt. It didn't matter, because these people learned to fashion clothes. That technology liberated us from the need for fur.

Today, the technology that we are developing is liberating us from the confines of our own bodies. In humans, intelligence has been always more important than physical strength. Still, until recent times, physical strength was still required, and actually still is in more primitive societies. In the future, we will certainly see wheelchairs that can climb stairs, and we probably will have robotic arms that can be used by people like the young man I saw today.

Where else are we being liberated by technology? Will we see cameras wired directly into the brain to allow the blind to see? How about the same with microphones for the deaf? The same can go for speech. In fact, Alexander Graham Bell was striving to find a way to allow the mute to speak, which led him to the telephone. Will people be able to communicate directly to a computer by being "hardwired" into the machine, totally eliminating the need for any physical movement? Imagine what Hawking could do if that were possible.

Someday the concept of a "handicapped" person may be very hard to comprehend. The idea that a person couldn't work simply because he or she was disabled physically may seem preposterous. I have no doubt that these changes will take place. What may lead to further changes is what I see with my own son. He has no physical outlet, so he concentrates his mind. He draws, reads, writes, and plays on the computer. A blind person develops keener hearing and touch to compensate for his or her lack of sight, and I think a physically challenged person develops a keener mind to compensate for the lack of physical strength.

Is his confinement to his body what makes Steven Hawking explore the mysteries of the universe on a mental scale? I can't answer that, but I suspect it's true at least to some extent. Will allowing physically disabled people function in society through technology unlock a greater reserve of mental talent than we have ever seen before in history? I am going to go out on a limb and say yes. We may be liberating ourselves from our bodies, and in the process moving forward into a realm we cannot begin to imagine.