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]

Chemistry

• Soviet scientists L. V. Radushkevich and V. M. Lukyanovich publish images of carbon nanotubes.^[6]

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.^[7]

Mathematics

• John Forbes Nash, Jr. produces groundbreaking work in the area of real algebraic geometry.^[8][9]

Medicine

• February 6 - In the United States, a mechanical heart is used for the first time in a human patient.^[10]
• Jean Delay, head of psychiatry at Sainte-Anne Hospital, Paris, with Jean-Francois Buisson, reports the antidepressant effect of isoniazid.^[11]

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.^[12] The elements einsteinium and fermium are discovered in the fallout.^[13]
• Geoffrey Dummer proposes the integrated circuit.^[14]

Awards

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

Births

• Simon P. Norton, English mathematician

Deaths

• March 5 - Sir Charles Sherrington (born 1857), English neurophysiologist & bacteriologist, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1932.
• November 2 - Chaim Weizmann (born 1874), chemist, first President of Israel.
• December 19 - Colonel Sir Charles Arden-Close (born 1865), British cartographer.

Notes

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