Lee Spetner

Lee Spetner was born in 1927 in St. Louis

Lee Spetner was born in St. Louis in 1927. He served in the US Navy from 1943 to 1945.

He earned a BS in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 1945. In 1950 he received a Ph.D. in physics from MIT.

From 1951 to 1970 he worked at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University on guided-missile systems. In 1970 he became technical director of Eljim, later a subsidiary of Elbit, in Nes Tsiona, where he worked on military electronic systems. He also taught at Johns Hopkins University, Howard University and the Weizmann Institute.

His interest in evolution began in the 1960s, and he published papers on it between 1964 and 1970. He proposed a nonrandom evolutionary hypothesis and argued that random mutations lose genetic information. He set out these views in books published in 1996 and 2014.

After retiring he continued to study evolution and cancer cures. He died in Jerusalem in 2024.