Grodzins was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of David Melvin Grodzins and his wife Taube Grodzins, Jewish emigrants, with roots in Poland and Grodno, Belarus.^[4] The family settled in Manchester, New Hampshire.^[2] He graduated with a BS degree in engineering in 1946 from the University of New Hampshire.^[5] He began his career with General Electric as an assistant in the nuclear physics group at their research laboratory in Schenectady, New York.^[1] He earned his PhD in physics at Purdue University in 1954 and taught for a year afterwards at Purdue.^[6][7]

From 1955 to 1958, Grodzins was a researcher with the nuclear physics group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, probing the properties of the nuclei of atoms. In 1956 he married a biologist whom he met at Brookhaven, Lulu née Anderson (1929– 2019).^[2][8] The same year, together with Maurice Goldhaber and Andrew Sunyar [de], Grodzins performed an experiment that determined that neutrinos have negative helicity. This work was important in our understanding of the weak interaction.^[6] Grodzins joined the faculty of the physics department of MIT in 1959 and was a professor of physics there from 1966 to 1998. In 1985, he carried out the first computer axial tomographic experiment using synchrotron radiation.^[1]

Meanwhile, in 1987, he co-founded and led research and development at Niton Corporation, which developed, manufactured and marketed test kits and instruments to measure radon gas in buildings and toxic elements, such as lead.^[6][9] There he also developed handheld devices that use X-ray fluorescence to determine the composition of metal alloys and to detect other materials.^[6] In 1998, he left MIT to work full-time directing the R&D group at Niton, and in 2005, he and his family sold Niton.^[10] His sister Ethel Grodzins Romm was the President and CEO of Niton,^[11] followed by his son Hal.^[12] Grodzins also developed devices to detect explosives, drugs and other contraband in luggage and cargo containers.^[6] Four of his devices earned R&D 100 awards, given annually by R&D Magazine to the 100 most innovative technical products in the US.^[1][13]

Grodzins wrote more than 150 technical papers and holds more than 50 US patents. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1964–65 and in 1971–72, and a Senior Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in 1980–81.^[1] He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Purdue University in 1998.^[6] He is a founding member of the Union of Concerned Scientists and was its president in 1972.^[1] In 1999, he founded Cornerstones of Science, a public library initiative to help children and adults explore science. He serves as its president.^[5] MIT named the Lee Grodzins Postdoctoral Fellows Lecture Award for him.^[14]

His sister Anne Grodzins Lipow was a librarian and library science expert,^[15] and his sister Ethel was an author, project manager, CEO and co-chair of the Lyceum Society of the New York Academy of Sciences.^[4][11]

• Grodzins describes Cornerstones of Science's vision (2015)
• Grodzins on C-Span (1996; testimony begins at 1:14:39)