Saul Numen was always curious and naturally found his way into scientific endeavors. He first met Chloe during college when they both took an anthropology class, for different reasons. But they both were consumed by their passions for their work and went their separate ways.

Saul received his MD/PHD training at the University of Texas in the laboratory of Dr. Harold Jackson then went on to do his internship at Johns Hopkins University where he became involved with the genetics group's Ubergene Expression Study.

He became involved with the group Doctors Without Borders and took with him the portion of the 'superman report' that required cataloguing the variety of metahuman phenotypes around the world. It was on a trip to Nigeria in 1984 that he met up again with Chloe, who was there working with a human rights group. The two reminisced about their college days, and then fell deeply in love.

Six months later at a temple in Tibet, the Dalai Lama pronounced the two man and wife. They continued to travel the world together, Chloe to continue her work with international and human rights groups and Saul to carry out his work in genetics. Sure, there was danger traveling to areas where political and economic upheaval occurred, but the shared adventure was something that both Saul and Chloe valued deeply. However, when Chloe became pregnant, they tried to settle down in Baltimore where Chloe entered law school. Their first child, Samantha, was born in the 1985.

In 1987, Saul and his co-authors published the Johns Hopkins Ubergene Expression Study. In the next few months, Saul and Akemi Kanemaru of the study patent the Numen-Kami test, which tests for the presence of ubergenes. In 1988, Saul developed and patented the portable Numen-Kami test device. In the same year, Saul and his partner Dr Akemi Kanemaru opened the first Numen-Kami Institute in Vienna, Austria. Royalties and licensing fees from the patents yielded a good nest egg for the family, which now numbered four with the birth of Balthasar in 1989. Chloe’s shrewd investments led to wealth.

[ The ubergene inheritable. Offspring of persons bearing a given phenotype will exhibit similar phenotype once the offspring's metagene becomes activated. Occasionally, a polarity switch modifying gene, still unidentified may cause a phenotype inverse to that of the parent. For example, in a case study reported by Nichols et al (Reference 24), patient T.A.'s uberhuman phenotype allows for pyrogenic effects while her child, patient, I.A. has a phenotype that allows for cryogenic effects.

- Excerpted from Kanemaru, A., Mehta, A., Numen, S. G., and Jacobs, T. R. 1987. Johns Hopkins Ubergene Expression Study: III. Inheritance of ubergene alleles. Journal of Uber-Genetics, vol 2, issue 1, page 1-15. ]

In 1992, Saul and Chloe took their families to eastern Turkey on a trip with three purposes. The first purpose and the primary reason for going was to seek out Arshavir Madrian, a mystic who purportedly could turn water into oil. But not being one to overlook secondary purposes, Saul was prepared to do a field survey study of the ubergenes of Armenia. A third purpose was the second field test of the Gene Alteration Ray Projector (a.k.a. the 'Gene Gun') as part of a project, sponsored by the Twist Foundation, to cure the son of a village mayor - a wolf-boy that was terrorizing the region's inhabitants.

As they were flying over Lake Van, Saul went to the minilab in the back of the plane to work on the Gene Gun since it was likely that curing a wolf-boy would be quite complex. It was then that a missile struck the craft and sent it in a twisting fall into the lake. The Gene Gun activated during the tumble and broke free of its lock-down bolts. Saul, the three children, Chloe and his sister Alsana, were struck by the uncontrolled, pulsating beam which altered their genes and inserted ubergene plasmids into the nuclei of their cells.

What resulted defied the assertion made by Saul and his colleagues that claimed a discrete pattern of ubergene inheritance and phenotype expression. Saul, Chloe, Alsana, and the three children came out of the lake each with a different mutant power.

The family continued to travel the world making documentaries about natural history and sociology. And Saul continued his side projects - research collaborations with his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and the Numen-Kami Institute, and carrying out the work of the Twist Foundation. But things were different. In some countries, their family's superhuman abilities give them a celebrity status. In others, they are treated as persona non-grata. Still, the New Men tried to do good wherever they went.

The decision to board the children in secret to school them was a tough one. Both Saul and Chloe valued family togetherness. But the lesson of Maximum Force brought out a degree of protectiveness in both parents that neither realized that they had. Education and sheltering seemed to be most important now.

But, the children, born into a life of adventure and with wondrous powers that made them different than other children, had, as Chloe put it 'ants in the pants'. Balthasar, especially, could not stay put.

Finally, deciding that it was better to hold their children close to those that most desired them and their safety, Saul told Chloe, "We need to bring them home."

Chloe nodded her head for their thoughts were akin, "Yes, home wherever in the world we may be..."

Saul is an affable man, seeming sometimes flighty and at other times almost lost in thought. He always seems to have multiple projects going on at the same time, usually all with a commonality of theme or location, but different projects, nonetheless. But when his family or friends are threatened, there's only one thing on his mind and he'll call out his opponents to get them to strike at himself rather than his loved ones.

Saul spends much of his free time overseeing the development of the Numen-Kami Institute whose purpose is to bring about a greater understanding of genetics, and in particular human genetics. In addition, he takes under his wing special graduate students - uberhumans with intelligence and a desire to become physicians, scientists, or engineers. These young men and women are often found with Saul learning both about science, engineering and about the responsibilities and use of uberhuman powers.

"There. Now I feel like a New Man once again."

While Saul will always emphasize his value in his knowledge of science and his connections with people all over the world (as well as on other worlds), he is also an uberman. New Man has remarkable regenerative powers. When he takes damage, even the biofiber of the uniform struggles to keep itself intact as fast as his own body does. Minor wounds close up in a second as do damage to his sense. Lost limbs bud out of the stump within a minute. He has even been killed seven times already.

After having to jury rig a dimensional stabilizer to save the New Men, Saul was trapped in another dimension for nearly a year before the actions of Chloe and Balthasar brought him back. He retired from superheroism spending much of his time monitoring the activities of Jeremy and his high school friends and helping Samantha transition to a life without her uberpowers. At the same time, he oversaw the growth of the Numen-Kami Institute. During his free time, he researched and experimented in the novel field of Temporal Physics, determined that such a situation that nearly killed his family would never happen again.

After an incident with a wild uber, Saul realized that the world needs every single hero that it has to make things better. He has recently completed the development of a new suit, styled after the one that Samantha first designed when she was a child. The workings of the suit are, however, quite different. Its Instead of regular biofiber, the suit has several ultrathin layers of biofibers, plastics, and ceramics some of which were woven to form a gesture-interface computer. Thus, the suit not only provides a small degree of protection, but also provides computing power to operate a five-dimensional control device.

For the little time that he spends grooming himself, Saul appears remarkably clean cut. While not flashy or especially handsome, he does have a certain camera presence. When not in his team uniform, Saul wears soft collared shirts and docker pants. In hot weather he prefers to sport a legionnaire style hat, while in cooler weather he is found with a sweatshirt bearing some sort of logo. As New Man, he wears the New Men team uniform, designed by Samantha when she was a young girl. Often, this is worn beneath his regular attire.