Fighting Fate

Pursued by 'the beast' of motor neurone disease, groundbreaking scientist Justin Yerbury wrote this extraordinary memoir entirely with eye movements. It is the sharpest possible lens on the value of life and hope. Justin Yerbury made a promise to his mother while she was dying of motor neurone disease (MND) that he would do everything he could to find a cure. MND had already taken several members of Justin's family, and he learned that they carried a rare genetic form of the disease that gave them a fifty-fifty chance of inheritance. Desperate to help his loved ones, Justin went to university to study science, eventually becoming a professor of molecular biology at the University of Wollongong and one of the world's leading experts on MND. While in New York, delivering a lecture on his groundbreaking research, Justin felt his thumb stop working – 'the beast' that had lurked so long in the shadows had caught up with him. Now 99 per cent paralysed and able to move only his eyeballs, Justin refuses to yield. With eye-tracking software, he has written his extraordinary memoir to shine light on this terrible disease and to show that, even in the bleakest of moments, there is always a reason to keep fighting.