The year 1941 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum publish "Genetic Control of Biochemical Reactions in Neurospora" which shows that specific genes code for specific proteins.^[1]

Chemistry

• February 23 - Chemical element 94, plutonium, is first synthesized by Glenn T. Seaborg, Arthur C. Wahl, Joseph W. Kennedy and Emilio Segr . It is kept secret until after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as it is being developed for the first atomic bombs.

Computer science

• John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry develop the Atanasoff Berry Computer.

History of science

• Charles Singer's A Short History of Science to the nineteenth century published in the U.K.

Mathematics

• Cahit Arf defines the Arf invariant of a nonsingular quadratic form over a field of characteristic 2.

Medicine

• February 12 - Reserve Constable Albert Alexander, a patient at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, becomes the first person treated with penicillin intravenously, by Howard Florey s team. He reacts positively but there is insufficient supply of the drug to reverse his terminal infection. A successful treatment is achieved during May.^[2]
• Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics is first published in New York.

Physics

• June - British scientist G. I. Taylor predicts the blast effects from an atomic bomb.^[3]
• June 28 - President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 8807 creating the Office of Scientific Research and Development with Vannevar Bush as its director. The office is charged with production of an atomic bomb.^[4]

Technology

• May 15 - First flight of the Gloster E.28/39, the first British jet aircraft.

Events

• February 20 - Polish microbiologist Ludwik Hirszfeld, his wife, Hanka, and daughter are forced to move into the Warsaw ghetto; here for two years he organizes anti-epidemic measures and vaccination campaigns against typhus and typhoid, as well as conducting secret medical courses.

Awards

• July 4 - Frederick Lindemann is raised to the British peerage as Baron Cherwell.^[5]

Births

• January 16 - Andr s S rk zy, Hungarian mathematician.
• March 26 - Richard Dawkins, British evolutionary biologist.
• August 2 - Jules A. Hoffman, Luxembourg-born winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2011).
• September 9 - Dennis Ritchie (died 2011), American computer scientist.
• September 10 - Stephen Jay Gould (died 2002), American paleontologist/evolutionist.
• Dan Shechtman, Israeli winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2011).

Deaths

• February 21 - Sir Frederick Banting (born 1891), Canadian discoverer of insulin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1923) (military aircraft accident)
• June 6 - Louis Chevrolet (born 1878), Swiss-born race driver and automobile builder in the United States.
• July 11 - Sir Arthur Evans (born 1851), English archaeologist.
• July 26 - Henri Lebesgue (born 1875), French mathematician.
• November 18 - Walther Nernst (born 1864), German physical chemist.

References

fr:1941 en science he:1941 mk:1941 no:Vitenskaps ret 1941 nn:Vitskap i 1941 pl:1941 w nauce pt:1941 na ci ncia ru:1941 sv:Vetenskaps ret 1941