Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920 in the town of Petrovichi, located approximately 400 km southwest of Moscow. He was the son of Judah Asimov (1896-1969) and Anna Rachel Berman Asimov (1895-1973). Asimov was named Isaac after his mother's father, Isaac Berman. He has a sister Marcia Asimov (1922-) and a brother Stanley Asimov (1929-1995).

His family left the Soviet Union on January 11, 1923 and arrived in New York City on February 3, 1923. He was educated in New York in public school (PS) 182 and later PS 202 when his family moved in 1928 to another area in New York. Though Asimov was not athletic, he was extremely smart and scored highest on the intelligence test at school. He rapidly advanced through high school 149 and graduated from it in 1932. Shortly after, Asimov entered tenth grade at Boys High School in the fall, and graduated in the spring of 1935 at the age of fifteen. He continued post-secondary education mainly at Columbia University. After completing a B.Sc. in Chemistry in 1939, Asimov applied for medical school. All five of his applications were rejected, however. He then pursued an M.Sc. in Chemistry, which he earned in 1941. Soon after that he was working on receiving his Ph.D., which he acquired in 1948 after lengthy delays from his wartime job and the army. Through his younger life, Asimov worked many odd jobs as well as in his parents candy store. After completing his Ph.D, he worked as a researcher in Columbia University researching antimalarial compounds. In the summer of 1949 he accepted a position as an instructor of biochemistry in Boston University School of Medicine. He later graduated to assistant professor and by 1955 he was associate professor. But Asimov had a greater love for writing, so he left the school of medicine in 1958 to pursue a career as a full-time writer, which he continued for the rest of his life. Even though Isaac Asimov was proud of his Jewish heritage, he had no religious beliefs about a god or an afterlife and believed that humans were the cause of all problems on the earth.