Ed Roberts

Ed Roberts caught polio in 1953, at 14, during the last big epidemic before the vaccine. It left him paralysed from the neck down, able to move two fingers and dependent on an iron lung for much of the day. He heard a doctor tell his mother he would be a vegetable, and for a time stopped eating. He finished high school by telephone, and the school then tried to withhold his diploma because he had not done physical education or driver training. His mother fought that and won.

The state rehabilitation department refused to fund his university studies on the grounds that he would never work. He got into the University of California at Berkeley in 1962 anyway. The university had nowhere to put him, so it housed him in an empty wing of the campus hospital. Other severely disabled students followed, and they called themselves the Rolling Quads and began demanding curb cuts and accessible buildings, and the right to hire their own attendants and live where they chose.

In 1972 he co-founded the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, run by disabled people for disabled people, which became the model for hundreds of centres worldwide. In 1975 the governor of California appointed him director of the state rehabilitation department, the agency that had once written him off, and he ran it for seven years.

He co-founded the World Institute on Disability in 1983 and received a MacArthur fellowship. He died in 1995; his wheelchair is in the Smithsonian.