Stephen Hawking is the World’s Well-Known Scientist Who Stated That Once “Doctors Offered to Let Me Die”. UK physicist Stephen Hawking had come so close to death while writing his bestseller ‘A Brief History of Time’ in 1985 that his doctors offered to switch off his life-support machine, it has emerged.The 71-year-old genius scientist reveals in a new documentary film that he was so close to death that doctors had offered his wife the chance to turn off the life support, in order to end his agony, after he contracted a chest infection in Switzerland that turned into pneumonia.