Ravetz was born in Philadelphia; his grandfather was a Russian-Jewish immigrant and his father a truck driver and trade union organiser.

He came to England in 1950 on a Fulbright Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied for a PhD in Pure Mathematics under the supervision of A.S. Besicovitch.

He highlighted the craft character of scientific knowledge, a set of procedures and evaluations that are part of the social activity of science.

His influential book Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems went through several English language editions, plus German and Japanese translations, and was republished in 1996.

Working with Silvio Funtowicz in Leeds [7] he created the NUSAP notational system, described in their book Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy (Reidel 1990).

[8] They also created the theory of Post-normal science, which applies when 'Facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.

On the former, he has co-authored (with Silvio Funtowicz) chapters on 'Science, New Forms of' and 'Peer Review and Quality Control' for the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (2015).

Ravetz studies new institutional models and collective behaviors that rehabilitate the function of science as a solver of the problem of the sustainability of contemporary material society that derives from the ongoing technological development.

He published a World View piece in the journal Nature on November 19, 2019, entitled Stop the science training that demands ‘don’t ask’.

[26] Seminar at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Oxford University, July 30, 2018, hosted by Jerome R. Ravetz with Philip Mirowski and Andrea Saltelli.