Doctor Noonian Soong was one of the Federation's leading cyberneticists during the 24th century.

He was a descendant of 22nd century criminal geneticist Arik Soong, who started work in cybernetics that his descendants, down to Noonian, continued. An associate of Ira Graves, as well as a star scientist of the Federation in his own right, Soong's early work was highly regarded, and he promised breakthroughs on the positronic brain. After failing to deliver on his promises, the disgraced and utterly humiliated Soong disappeared. Traveling under an assumed name to a colony on Omicron Theta, he continued his research, unbeknownst to anyone but his neighbors.

While living on Omicron Theta, Soong met and fell in love with Juliana O'Donnell and the pair married in secret on Mavala IV. Together, they perfected his design and built functional androids with advanced artificial intelligence. Each of the androids created by the Soongs represented an advancement and refinement of the potential for their creations. B-4 was a relatively primitive android, capable of only the most basic speech and motorization. Lore, the fourth attempt, displayed tremendous advances in cognitive abilities and interaction but had difficulty in adapting to ethical subroutines designed to facilitate interaction among Humans and was emotionally unstable. For this reason, he had Lore deactivated and began work on his fifth attempt: Data, who was the most successful. Despite lacking emotional ability and requiring a "learning" period, Data advanced further and more quickly than Doctor Soong had originally hoped.

In 2338, when the colony on Omicron Theta came under attack by the Crystalline Entity, Soong escaped, but his wife was fatally injured, and he was assumed dead while in fact he continued his research in secret at a new location. The inert body of Data and the disassembled body of Lore were left behind on the colony, to be discovered later by Starfleet. Soong knew Data had been rescued and followed his life in secret, but assumed that Lore had been left disassembled and inert. Some of the research that he did after the attack involved the creation of an upgrade chip to Data that would, among other things, give him the ability to experience the range of Human emotions previously unavailable to him.

Unable to let Juliana go, Noonian transferred his comatose wife's memories into an advanced android body before her passing. The Juliana android, though still a Soong-type design, greatly advanced Soong's goal of replicating Human abilities in an android. The new android design was so advanced that she never realized she was not the original Juliana. When Soong began to become too caught up in his work, she later divorced Soong, moved away, and remarried.

Upon perfecting this emotion chip, Soong activated a homing device which compelled Data to hijack the USS Enterprise-D to Terlina III. However, unbeknownst to Soong, the same signal summoned the re-activated Lore, who posed as Data, in order to steal the new emotion chip. Soon after this incident, Lore murdered his "father," and Dr. Noonien Soong died.