Henry FitzGerald Heard (6 October 1889 – 14 August 1971), commonly called Gerald Heard, was a British-born American historian, science writer, public lecturer, educator, philosopher, and philanthropist. He wrote many articles and over 35 books. Heard was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known people in the 1950s and 1960s, including author Aldous Huxley, Henry Luce, Clare Boothe Luce, and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. His work was a forerunner of, and influence on, the consciousness development movement that has spread in the Western world since the 1960s. Early life The son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, Heard was born in London. He grew to be an earnest, disciplined, resolute young man. Fascinated with science and technology from childhood, he had turned away from the sort of religiosity and doctrinaire theology of his parents. He studied history and theology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with honours in history. After working in other roles, he lectured from 1926 to 1929 for Oxford University's extramural-studies programme. Heard took a strong interest in developments in the sciences and, in 1929, edited The Realist, a short-lived monthly journal of scientific humanism whose sponsors included H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Julian Huxley, and Aldous Huxley. In 1927 Heard began lecturing for the South Place Ethical Society. During the 1930s he became the first science commentator for the BBC. As a young man, he worked for the Agricultural Cooperative Movement in Ireland. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he acted as the personal secretary of Sir Horace Plunkett, founder of the cooperative movement, who spent his last years at Weybridge, Surrey. Naomi Mitchison, who admired Plunkett and was a friend of Heard, wrote of that time: "H.P., as we all called him, was getting past his prime and often ill but struggling to go on with the work to which he was devoted. Gerald [Heard] who was shepherding him about fairly continually, apologized once for leaving a dinner party abruptly when H.P. was suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion". In the mid-1920s, Heard began a romantic relationship with socialite Christopher Wood, the young heir to a large grocery fortune, with whom he lived in London; by around 1935, however, Heard had declared himself celibate, through he continued to cohabit with Wood. Horace Plunkett owned real estate in the U.S. states of Nebraska and Wyoming, and left some properties to Heard in his will. Career Heard first embarked