Gene Roddenberry

Gene Roddenberry was an American screenwriter, television producer, and Air Force veteran who created the Star Trek franchise. Born Eugene Wesley Roddenberry in El Paso, Texas, in 1921 and raised in Los Angeles, he studied police science at Los Angeles City College and was flying B-17 bombers in the South Pacific by 1942, completing eighty-nine missions and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war he worked briefly for Pan American World Airways before joining the Los Angeles Police Department, where he wrote speeches for Chief William Parker while moonlighting on television scripts for Highway Patrol, Have Gun – Will Travel, and The Lieutenant. He resigned from the LAPD in 1956 to write full time and produced the unsold pilot The Cage for Desilu in 1964.

NBC retooled the project and aired Star Trek from 1966 to 1969, and although the original series drew modest ratings it found a second life in syndication that supported an animated series, six theatrical features with the original cast, and the launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. He insisted on a multiracial bridge crew and on optimism about humanity's future as core constraints on the writers' room.

He served as executive producer on The Next Generation until his health declined and died of cardiac arrest in Santa Monica in 1991 at age seventy. In 1997 a portion of his cremated remains became the first to be carried to space aboard a commercial Celestis rocket.

The name Gene is an English short form of Eugene, from the Greek Eugenios, meaning well-born through the elements eu meaning good and genes meaning born or descended. Common among American boys of the 1920s and 1930s, the short form carried a Hollywood ease. He gave the well-born root a stubbornly utopian charge.