If you read that New Yorker piece, it makes it clear that Reeve's pig-headedness allowed him to bug the crap out of the research community to quit dithering around with bench research and coordinate their efforts toward real treatments.

Deborah Norville's show was devoted to Reeves tonight, and the neurologist from Rutgers said Reeves had changed his thinking to where he could actually start to consider the word "cure."

Another guy mentioned in the New Yorker had some ideas about exercise, and Reeve nudged him into opening a clinic, where he's now working with 40 patients, and is starting a pediatric program.

Look, it takes all kinds. I don't see how it's anybody's business what another person does with his time and energy. Everybody has their windmill to tilt at. Reeve did a lot of important work toward finding a cure for spinal cord injury, and that work will one day bear fruit.

As someone with three friends in chairs, I take exception to that.   Chris Reeve was fighting for the sort of support that people with less life-limiting injuries badly need, but do not always get.  Reeve's very high spinal fracture always made his outcome problematic, at best.  That he enjoyed the quality of life that he did, and used the last nine years of his life so productively, is a testament to his character, and importantly, to that of his family.  My respect for his wife is enormous.  That said, within their means, and as their circumstances permit, the families of all spinal cord victims are equally heroic.  In Reeve's case, they took the injunction that, "To whom much is given, much is expected", and God do I honor them for that!

In regard to Krauthammer's call for resignation, acceptance, moving on and learning to love the chair...   we did not need another spokesperson for that point of view.  THAT is conventional wisdom.  What was needed was someone to shake things up, to speak about subjects that medical science had lost the will to pursue aggressively.  What Reeve asked them to do was to take on the challenge, as surely as the US took on the task of putting a man on the moon;  that is, to set a seemingly impossible goal, then to work to make the impossible possible.

I cannot comment on the agony of Charles Krauthammer's life, or how he feels about "what might have been" in his life.  Given the rage and anguish he must feel, indeed that we would feel in his place, his response to Reeve is understandable.  I can understand that to Krauthammer it seemed like to much hot air, so much a personality-cult response to disability.  Those are fair points, but that is often how life is:  the right things get done for the wrong reasons.