The physicist Stephen Hawking is defending Britain's National Health Service after an editorial in Investor's Business Daily said Mr. Hawking "wouldn't have a chance in the U.K.," where the health service would have deemed his life "essentially worthless."

The problem with the editorial, of course, is that Mr. Hawking, the author of "A Brief History of Time," is very much a Briton — born in Oxford and currently a professor at the University of Cambridge.