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Saturday 17 September 2011

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was born in Russia to a Jewish family on January 2, 1920. He was taken to the United States when he was three, and learnt English and Yiddish as his native languages.

He wrote or edited more than 500 books during his lifetime.


After becoming established in the U.S., his parents owned a succession of candy stores in which everyone in the family was expected to work.

The candy stores sold magazines, which presented the young Asimov with an unending supply of reading material (including pulp science fiction magazines).

Asimov spent much of his time reading science fiction novels as a boy, although his father considered them rubbish.

He started studying zoology through Columbia University's extension program before switching to chemistry after his first semester as he disapproved of "dissecting an alley cat". and eventually received his Ph.D. in biochemistry.

Asimov's degree allowed him to secure a position on the medical faculty at Boston University. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.

Asimov has the honor of being the only person who has authored a book in each of the Dewey Decimal System classifications.

He is best known for his science fiction novels, which have influenced sci-fi on television and the movies.

Isaac Asimov’s story Runaround, in which he set out the three Laws of Robotics, is set in 2015.

Isaac Asimov received a letter congratulating him on an accidental prediction of alpha-particle RAM errors in his 1952 novel Caves of Steel.


Isaac Asimov was an on-again, off- again member of MENSA. He drifted in and out of active membership due to some unpleasant members who were "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs,"

Asimov was a claustrophile, meaning that he had an abnormal desire to be in small, confined spaces.

He generally preferred to write in small, windowless rooms.

Asimov lived in an apartment overlooking New York's Central Park, but nearly always had the blinds down, so he would not be distracted from his work by the views.


His skin was so sensitive to the sun that even ten minutes out in the open would cause it to burn.

In 1981, Radio Shack delivered a TRS-80 computer to Isaac Asimov's apartment. Although initially reluctant to use it, a Radio Shack employee came to set it up and teach Asimov. This would end the author's exclusive use of a typewriter and he would eventually appear in Radio Shack's advertising.

Asimov hated flying so much that he let it limit the places to which he'd travel, preferring to see the world by car or cruise ship.

Although ethnically a Jew, Asimov was an atheist and a humanist. He was extremely proud of his role as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Rowena Morrill's portrait of Asimov enthroned with symbols of his life's work

When Isaac Asimov had heart surgery in 1983, he received blood infected with HIV. He died nine years later in New York City on April 6, 1992 from heart and kidney failure due to complications from HIV. Isaac Asimov died of complications from AIDS, after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion. His family hid the cause of his death due to the stigma attached to AIDS in the early 1990s

Source Biography.com

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