1972 in science


1972 in science


The year 1972 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

  • January 5 – President of the United States Richard Nixon orders the development of a Space Shuttle program.
  • February 4 – Mariner 9 sends pictures from Mars.
  • February 21 – The Soviet uncrewed spacecraft Luna 20 lands on the Moon.
  • March 2 – Launch of Pioneer 10 spacecraft.
  • April 16 – Apollo 16 launched.
  • June 30 – The International Time Bureau adds the first leap second to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
  • July 23 – The United States launches Landsat 1, the first Earth-resources satellite.
  • December 7 – Apollo 17 launched with three astronauts and five mice, and The Blue Marble photograph of the Earth is taken.
  • December 11 – NASA astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt land on the Moon and begin a three-day exploration.

Biology

  • February – S. J. Singer and Garth L. Nicolson describe the fluid mosaic model of the functional cell membrane.
  • September – Geoffrey Burnstock proposes the existence of a non-adrenergic, non-cholinergic (NANC) neurotransmitter, which he identifies as adenosine triphosphate (ATP), originating the term 'purinergic signalling'.
  • October 1 – The first publication reporting the production of a recombinant DNA molecule, by Paul Berg and colleagues, marks the birth of modern molecular biology methodology.
  • Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould publish their landmark paper on punctuated equilibrium.
  • Socorro doves (Zenaida graysoni) last seen in the wild. The species precariously survives in captivity. A reintroduction program is being prepared.

Computer science

  • April 6 – Cray Research founded.
  • May – Magnavox release the first home video game console which can be connected to a television set – the Magnavox Odyssey, invented by Ralph H. Baer.
  • July 12 – First C compiler released.
  • October – The First International Conference on Computer Communications is held in Washington, D.C., and hosts the first public demonstration of ARPAnet, a precursor of the Internet.
  • November 29 – Atari release the production version of Pong, one of the first video games, devised by Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn.
  • Karen Spärck Jones introduces the concept of inverse document frequency (idf) weighting in information retrieval.
  • Write-only memory is devised as a joke in Signetics.

Earth sciences

  • February 8 – First Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) defined at the Silurian-Devonian boundary at Klonk in the Czech Republic.

Ecology

  • January – A Blueprint for Survival first published as a special edition of The Ecologist magazine in the United Kingdom.
  • James Lovelock first refers to the Gaia hypothesis in print.
  • The Climatic Research Unit is founded by climatologist Hubert Lamb at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

Mathematics

  • Daniel Quillen formulates higher algebraic K-theory.
  • Daniel Gorenstein announces a 16-step program for completing the classification of finite simple groups.
  • Richard M. Karp shows that the Hamiltonian cycle problem is NP-complete.

Medicine

  • January 31 – Immunosuppressive effect of ciclosporin discovered by a team at Sandoz, Basel, under Hartmann F. Stähelin.
  • Harvey J. Alter identifies the presence of hepatitis C virus.
  • Tu Youyou and collaborators obtain a pure extract of the antiplasmodial drug artemisinin.
  • Archie Cochrane publishes Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services in the U.K.
  • John Yudkin publishes Pure, White and Deadly in the U.K., warning of the dangers of sucrose in diet.
  • The last major epidemic of smallpox in Europe breaks out in Yugoslavia.

Metrology

  • 00:00:00 UTC matches 00:00:10 TAI exactly and the tick rate of UTC is changed to match TAI exactly.

Paleontology

  • Kielan-Jawarowska and Rinchen Barsbold report the associated remains of a Velociraptor and Protoceratops apparently killed and preserved while fighting.

Psychology

  • Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky begin to publish together on cognitive bias and heuristics in judgment and decision-making.

Technology

  • February 1 – The first scientific hand-held calculator (labeled Hewlett-Packard, later designated the HP-35) is introduced, at a price of $395.00.
  • July 10 – Jack Cover files U.S. patent 3,803,463 for the original form of Taser electroshock weapon.
  • English inventor Peter Powell develops a steerable dual-line kite.

Awards

  • Nobel Prizes
    • Physics – John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, John Robert Schrieffer
    • Chemistry – Christian B. Anfinsen, Stanford Moore, William H. Stein
    • Medicine – Gerald Edelman, Rodney R Porter
  • Turing Award – Edsger Dijkstra

Births

  • March 31 – Evan Williams, American Internet entrepreneur.
  • April 5 – Nima Arkani-Hamed, Canadian-American theoretical physicist.
  • June 21 – Warren Lyford DeLano, American bioinformatician and open source advocate (d. 2009).
  • unknown date – Kathy Vivas, Venezuelan astrophysicist

Deaths

  • February 20 – Maria Goeppert Mayer (b. 1906), German-American theoretical physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
  • May 4 – Edward Calvin Kendall (b. 1886), American chemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
  • May 8 – Beatrice Helen Worsley (b. 1921), Canadian computer scientist.
  • August 11 – Max Theiler (b. 1899), South African-born American virologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
  • August 22 – Ștefan Procopiu (b. 18990), Romanian physicist.
  • August 25 – Lucien Bull (b. 1876), Irish-born French pioneer in chronophotography.
  • October 1 – Louis Leakey (b. 1903), British paleoanthropologist.
  • November 25 – Henri Coandă (b. 1886), Romanian aeronautical engineer.

References


Text submitted to CC-BY-SA license. Source: 1972 in science by Wikipedia (Historical)



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