Lawrence P. Lessing is an American

science writer Science journalism conveys reporting about science to the public. The field typically involves interactions between scientists, journalists and the public. Origins Modern science journalism originated in weather and other natural history obs ...

. A native of

Buffalo, New York Buffalo is a Administrative divisions of New York (state), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York and county seat of Erie County, New York, Erie County. It lies in Western New York at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of ...

, he started his career as a newspaper man in

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

. There he was a correspondent for ''Time'' magazine. He was a long-time member of the board of editors of ''Fortune'' magazine, where he contributed articles on electronics, jet propulsion, automation, metallurgy. From 1953 to 1955, he was an editor and contributor to ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

''. Lessing won the 1965 AAAS-Westinghouse Science Journalism Award for his article in ''Fortune'' on the causes of earthquakes. Lessing is the author of three books, ''Man of High Fidelity:

Edwin Howard Armstrong Edwin Howard Armstrong (December 18, 1890 – February 1, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor who developed FM (frequency modulation) radio and the superheterodyne receiver system. He held 42 patents and received numerous awa ...

'' (1956), ''Understanding Chemistry'' (1957), and ''DNA: at the core of life itself'' (1967). He was for some time on the editorial board of ''Fortune'' magazine and was a vigorous opponent of government interference with and distortion of scientific fact (see, for instance, his essay "In Defense of Science", and "Man of High Fidelity"). Lawrence Lessing collaborated with graphic designer Will Burtin for more than twenty years. The two are best known for the juxtaposition of Burtin's graphics with Lessing's descriptive copy. In a wartime project commissioned in 1942 by The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on behalf of the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), Burtin and Lessing create
aerial gunnery manuals
to teach new bomber crew gunners how to range and aim their Browning machine guns in order to hit fast–moving enemy fighters. The two worked together again at ''Fortune'' magazine from 1945: Burtin became the magazine's art director, Lessing a noted science and technology writer and editor. Burtin started his own graphic design company in 1949, commissioning Lessing to write much of the text for the designer's science–based projects. Their collaboration extended through a series of Burtin's large-scale medical models from the late 1950s, ending only with Burtin's death in 1971.

Works

* ''Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong'' Lawrence Lessing. Lippincott; (1956) * ''Understanding Chemistry''. Lawrence Lessing. Interscience Publishers (1957) * ''DNA: At the Core of Life Itself'' Lawrence P. Lessing. Macmillan Publishing Company (1967)

Honors

* James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry (1963) * AAAS-Westinghouse Science Journalism Award (1965)

References

Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin
by R. Roger Remington and Robert S. P. Fripp. See Lessing references on pp. 36, 37, 46, 47 and 59. Lund Humphries Publishing (2007). Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American technology journalists American male journalists American science writers {{US-journalist-20thC-stub