He was a long-time member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine, where he contributed articles on electronics, jet propulsion, automation, metallurgy.
Lessing won the 1965 AAAS-Westinghouse Science Journalism Award for his article in Fortune on the causes of earthquakes.
[1] 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",[2] and "Man of High Fidelity").
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 created 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.