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, considered a seminal piece of work in morphogenesis.
• August 28 – Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley publish the Hodgkin–Huxley model of action potentials in neurons of the squid giant axon.
• September 20 – Publication of the paper on the Hershey–Chase experiment showing conclusively that DNA, not protein, is the genetic material of bacteriophages.
• Biochemists Jack Gross and Rosalind Pitt-Rivers discover the thyroid hormone triiodothyronine.
• 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.

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.

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.
• The Bradley–Terry model in probability theory is presented.

Medicine

• February 6 – A mechanical heart is used for the first time in a human patient, in the United States.
• 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 reasignment 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.
• 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.
• Jean Delay, head of psychiatry at Sainte-Anne Hospital, Paris, with Jean-François Buisson, reports the antidepressant effect of isoniazid.

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. The elements einsteinium and fermium are discovered in the fallout.
• Geoffrey Dummer proposes the integrated circuit.

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, though it does not make its first appearance in an American shop until 1974.

Awards

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

Births

• February 19 – Marcia McNutt, American geophysicist and science editor.
• February 28 – Simon P. Norton, English mathematician.

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.