1952 in science

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The year 1952 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• August 1 – Around 9 o'clock AM, the San Benedicto rock wren goes extinct as its island home is smothered in a massive volcanic eruption.
• August 14 – Alan Turing's paper "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" is published, putting forward a reaction–diffusion hypothesis of pattern formation,^[1] considered a seminal piece of work in morphogenesis.^[2][3]
• August 28 – Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley publish the Hodgkin–Huxley model of action potentials in neurons of the squid giant axon.^[4]
• September 20 – Publication of the paper on the Hershey–Chase experiment showing conclusively that DNA, not protein, is the genetic material of bacteriophages.^[5]
• Biochemists Jack Gross and Rosalind Pitt-Rivers discover the thyroid hormone triiodothyronine.^[6]
• The Braeburn apple cultivar is discovered as a chance seedling in New Zealand.

Chemistry

• Soviet scientists L. V. Radushkevich and V. M. Lukyanovich publish images of carbon nanotubes.^[7]

Computer science

• The first autocode and its compiler are developed by Alick Glennie for the Manchester Mark 1 computer, considered as the first working high-level compiled programming language.^[8]

History of science

• Discovery by Derek J. de Solla Price of a lost medieval scientific work entitled Equatorie of the Planetis, initially attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer.

Mathematics

• John Forbes Nash, Jr. produces groundbreaking work in the area of real algebraic geometry.^[9][10]
• The Bradley–Terry model in probability theory is presented.^[11]

Medicine

• February 6 – A mechanical heart is used for the first time in a human patient, in the United States.^[12]
• March 1 – The British Psychological Society is founded.
• September 2 – The first successful operation to correct a cardiac shunt ("hole in the heart") is performed by Drs F. John Lewis and C. Walton Lillehei on a 5-year-old girl in the United States utilising the induced hypothermia technique developed by Wilfred Gordon "Bill" Bigelow.
• November 20 – The first successful sex reassignment surgery is performed in Copenhagen, making George Jorgensen Jr. become Christine Jorgensen.
• December 14 – The first successful surgical separation of conjoined twins is conducted in Mount Sinai Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio.
• December – Robert Gwyn Macfarlane and colleagues publish the first identification of Haemophilia B.^[13]
• American obstetrical anesthesiologist Dr. Virginia Apgar devizes the Apgar score as a simple replicable method of quickly and summarily assessing the health of babies immediately after childbirth.^[14][15]
• Jean Delay, head of psychiatry at Sainte-Anne Hospital, Paris, with Jean-François Buisson, reports the antidepressant effect of isoniazid.^[16]

Physics

• November 1 – Nuclear testing: Operation Ivy – The United States successfully detonates the first hydrogen device, codenamed "Ivy Mike" ["m" for megaton], at Eniwetok island in the Bikini Atoll located in the Pacific Ocean.^[17] The elements einsteinium and fermium are discovered in the fallout.^[18]
• Geoffrey Dummer proposes the integrated circuit.^[19]

Technology

• September 30 – The Cinerama widescreen film system, developed by Fred Waller, debuts with the movie This Is Cinerama at the Broadway Theatre in New York City.
• October 7 – The barcode is patented in the United States by Norman J. Woodland and Bernard Silver,^[20] though it does not make its first appearance in an American shop until 1974.^[21]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Felix Bloch, Edward Mills Purcell
  • Chemistry – Archer John Porter Martin, Richard Laurence Millington Synge
  • Medicine – Selman Abraham Waksman

Births

• February 2 – Ralph Merkle, American computer scientist, co-inventor of public-key cryptography.
• February 19 – Marcia McNutt, American geophysicist and science editor.
• February 28 – Simon P. Norton, English mathematician, co-discoverer of 'monstrous moonshine'.

Deaths

• March 5 – Sir Charles Sherrington (born 1857), English neurophysiologist and bacteriologist, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1932.
• September 5 – Hermann Stieve (born 1886), German anatomist and histologist.
• November 2 – Chaim Weizmann (born 1874), Belarusian-born chemist, first President of Israel.
• December 19 – Colonel Sir Charles Arden-Close (born 1865), British cartographer.

Notes

1. Turing, A. M. (14 August 1952). "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (London) 237 (641): 37–72. doi:10.1098/rstb.1952.0012. JSTOR 92463. Submitted November 1951.
2. "Control Mechanism For Biological Pattern Formation Decoded". ScienceDaily. 30 November 2006.
3. "Turing's Last, Lost Work". Swintons. Retrieved 28 November 2011. (Archived April 30, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.)
4. Hodgkin, A. L.; Huxley, A. F. (1952). "A Quantitative Description of Membrane Current and its Application to Conduction and Excitation in Nerve". The Journal of Physiology 117 (4): 500–544. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1952.sp004764. PMC 1392413. PMID 12991237.
5. Hershey, A. D.; Chase, Martha (1952). "Independent Functions of Viral Protein and Nucleic Acid in Growth of Bacteriophage". The Journal of General Physiology 36 (1): 39–56. doi:10.1085/jgp.36.1.39. PMC 2147348. PMID 12981234.
6. Gross, J.; Pitt-Rivers, R. (1952). "The Identification of 3:5:3'-L-Triiodothyronine in Human Plasma". The Lancet (London) 259 (6705): 439–441. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(52)91952-1.
7. Радушкевич, Л. В. (1952). О Структуре Углерода, Образующегося При Термическом Разложении Окиси Углерода На Железном Контакте. Журнал Физической Химии (in Russian) 26: 88–95.
8. Knuth, Donald E.; Pardo, Luis Trabb. "Early development of programming languages". Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology (Dekker) 7: 419–493.
9. Nash, J. F. (1952). "Real algebraic manifolds". Annals of Mathematics 56: 405–21. doi:10.2307/1969649. MR 0050928..
10. International Congress of Mathematicians (1952), Proceedings 2, Providence: American Mathematical Society, pp. 516–17
11. Bradley, Ralph Allan; Terry, Milton E. (1952). "Rank Analysis of Incomplete Block Designs: I. The Method of Paired Comparisons". Biometrika 39 (3/4): 324. doi:10.2307/2334029. JSTOR 2334029.
12. "The First Mechanical Heart Pump". GeneralMotors.com. Retrieved 2009-12-29.
13. Biggs, R.; Douglas, A. S.; MacFarlane, R. G.; Dacie, J. V.; Pitney, W. R.; Merskey, C.; O'Brien, J. R. (1952). "Christmas disease: a condition previously mistaken for haemophilia". British Medical Journal 2 (4799): 1378–82. doi:10.1136/bmj.2.4799.1378. PMC 2022306. PMID 12997790.
14. Apgar, Virginia (1953). "A proposal for a new method of evaluation of the newborn infant". Current Research in Anesthesia and Analgesia 32 (4): 260–267. doi:10.1213/00000539-195301000-00041. PMID 13083014.
15. Finster, M.; Wood, M. (May 2005). "The Apgar score has survived the test of time". Anesthesiology 102 (4): 855–857. doi:10.1097/00000542-200504000-00022. PMID 15791116.
16. Healy, David (1996). The Psychopharmacologists: Interviews. London: Chapman and Hall. p. 8. ISBN 978-1-86036-008-4.
17. "Hydrogen Bomb". The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 15 January 2010. Retrieved 2009-12-29.
18. Ghiorso, Albert (2003). "Einsteinium and Fermium". Chemical & Engineering News 81 (36). Retrieved 2012-02-08.
19. The Hutchinson Factfinder. Helicon. 1999. ISBN 1-85986-000-1.
20. "Patent US2612994 – Classifying Apparatus And Method". Retrieved 2013-06-17.
21. Kleinman, Zoe (2012-10-07). "Barcode birthday: 60 years since patent". BBC News. Retrieved 2013-06-17.