Robert Otto Becker was born in 1923 in River Edge, New Jersey, and raised in Valley Stream, New York, where his father Otto Julius Becker served as the pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church; his mother was Elizabeth Blanck Becker. In 1941 he entered Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where he majored in biology and performed his first experiments on salamander regeneration. He served in the army from 1942 to 1946; when he completed his bachelor’s degree he entered medical school at New York University, and met and married Lillian Moller, a fellow student. He obtained his medical degree in 1948, interned for a year, and for the next seven years studied pathology, surgery, and orthopedic surgery; for two of those years he was a medical officer in the army. He chose to specialize in orthopedic surgery, and his training took place mostly at the Veterans Administration hospital in Brooklyn.