David Starr - Space Ranger
From back cover Signet paperback December 1971:

**planet in turmoil!**

The Solar System had long ago been colonized by an Earth suffering from a dwindling food supply and a millionfold increase in population.  The colonies were her very lifeblood.  Without the daily flow of products from them, Earth would experience mass starvation and chaos within weeks.  Suddenly and unexpectedly, reports of fatal food poisoning, traceable to Martian produce, began to reach the ruling Council of Science.  Each new case was treated with intense secrecy for it the people of Earth learned the cause of these deaths, a worldwide panic would surely ensue.

To David Starr, Space Ranger, these deadly incidents formed a terrifying pattern -- they were clearly part of a clever and brutal scheme by an alien conspiracy to cripple Earth's economic life and topple its government!
Fiction, Aesthetics, Kurzgeschichte, American Science Fiction, Science Fiction
Isaac Asimov
Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers.  Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.  His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old.  He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen, he was selling them to the science fiction magazines. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942.  During World War II he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station.  After the war, he returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948.  He then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine until 1958, when he became a full-time writer. His first novel, [Pebble in the Sky](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W), was published in 1950. He and his wife divorced in 1973, and he married Janet O. Jeppson the same year. He was a highly prolific writer, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards.