Isaac Asimov

Born in Petrovichi, Russian SFSR, on a date between October 1919 and January 1920 (he celebrated 2 January), Isaac Asimov was the son of Judah Asimov, the son of a miller, and Anna Rachel Berman, Russian Jews who emigrated to Brooklyn in 1923. He survived a Petrovichi pneumonia outbreak as an infant that killed sixteen other children. His parents ran a succession of candy stores stocked with pulp magazines, which gave the boy an unending supply of science fiction he could not otherwise have afforded. He taught himself to read at five, graduated high school at fifteen, took a B.S. and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia, and joined the Boston University School of Medicine in 1949 as a biochemistry instructor, eventually rising to full professor. His first published story appeared in Astounding in 1939; the Three Laws of Robotics were worked out the next year with John W. Campbell. He wrote or edited more than five hundred books across science fiction, mysteries, popular science, Bible commentary, Shakespeare, and humour; the Foundation trilogy, charting the fall and rebirth of a galactic empire, won the one-time Hugo for Best All-Time Series in 1966. A claustrophile who loved enclosed spaces and feared flying, he was president of the American Humanist Association and an outspoken atheist. His short story Nightfall was voted in 1964 by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. He died in New York on 6 April 1992, aged seventy-two, of complications from HIV he had contracted from a contaminated blood transfusion during heart bypass surgery in 1983, a fact concealed at the family's request until 2002.

In 1948, months before his doctoral defense, Asimov published, under his own name, a spoof paper on thiotimoline, a fictional chemical that dissolved in water a second before the water was added. His examiners opened the oral exam by asking him to explain its thermodynamic properties. Relief undid him: he had to be led from the room laughing.