Howard Hinton grew up in Mexico and attended Modesto Junior College[2] and the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate.
[3] During World War II he worked on the problem of storage of food products to counter the depredation of moths and beetles.
[4] He was an early proponent of continental drift, based on the close relationship between non-migratory water beetles of the family Elmidae in rivers in New Guinea and northern Australia.
He worked for many years on cryptobiosis, experimenting with a species of African fly that could withstand long periods of dehydration, positing that this might also be the key to space voyaging.
His grandfather, Charles Howard Hinton was a mathematician who worked on the concept of four-dimensional space, and had to leave Victorian England when he was found guilty of bigamy.