The Isaac author Asimov Isaac Asimov was born on 2nd January 1920 in Russia to a Jewish family of millers1. His family emigrated to the United States when he was three and never taught him to speak Russian. He grew up in New York, spending his childhood in his parents shop and reading science fiction magazines. He began writing his own science fiction stories at eleven and by nineteen he was selling them to science fiction magazines. He attended New York City public schools, and Columbia University, where, in 1948 he obtained a doctorate in biochemistry. Meanwhile he had a brief military career soon after World War II, when he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Naval Air Experimental Station. After his PhD2, he joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine and remained there as a professor of biochemistry. He married twice and had two children from his first wife, who he divorced in 1973 after a 31-year marriage. He was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small enclosed spaces, but was terribly afraid of flying and this phobia influenced several of his fiction works. He enjoyed going on cruise ships and taking part in science fiction conventions, he loved contact with the public and his fans, he was also a member of some groups interested in mystery stories, and from 1985 until his death was president of the American Humanist Association. He was a rationalist and had strong religious influences but called himself an atheist or, better, a humanist. He supported the Democratic Party and believed in population control, feminism and homosexuality as a moral right . He died on 6th April 1992. He was survived by his second wife who revealed ten years later in the epilogue of his autobiography 1. millers: people who own or work in a mill, that is a place where you make flour. 2. PhD: Doctor of Philosophy, a university degree of a very high level, which involves doing advanced research. 85