Lawrence P. Lessing is an award-winning science writer.

A native of Buffalo, New York, he started his career as a newspaper man in Pittsburgh. There he was a correspondent for Time Magazine. He joined the staff at Fortune Magazine where he contributed articles on electronics, jet propulsion, automation, metallurgy, and so on.

From 1953 to 1955, he was an editor and contributor to Scientific American

Scientific American

Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...

. 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 (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").

Works

• Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong Lawrence Lessing. Lippincott; (1956) ASIN B0007DVUK4
• Understanding Chemistry. Lawrence Lessing. Interscience Publishers (1957) ISBN 9780451022608
• DNA: At the Core of Life Itself Lawrence P. Lessing. Macmillan Publishing Company (1967) ISBN 978-0025715905

Honors

• James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry
  James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry
  The James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public is awarded on a yearly basis by the American Chemical Society. The Award recognizes outstanding reporting on chemistry, chemical engineering, and related chemical fields...
  
   (1963)
• AAAS-Westinghouse Science Journalism Award (1965)