The year1952 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

• August 1 – Around 9 o'clock AM Pacific Time Zone, theSan Benedicto rock wren goesextinct asits island home is smothered in a massivevolcanic eruption.
• August 14 –Alan Turing's paper "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" is published, putting forward areaction–diffusion hypothesis ofpattern formation,^[1] considered a seminal piece of work inmorphogenesis.^[2][3]
• August 28 –Alan Hodgkin andAndrew Huxley publish theHodgkin–Huxley model ofaction potentials inneurons of thesquid giant axon.^[4]
• September 20 – Publication of the paper on theHershey–Chase experiment showing conclusively thatDNA, notprotein, is the genetic material ofbacteriophages.^[5]
• October – Danish virologistPreben von Magnus publishes his observation of thevon Magnus phenomenon producingdefective interfering particles.^[6]
• Biochemists Jack Gross andRosalind Pitt-Rivers discover thethyroid hormonetriiodothyronine.^[7]
• TheBraeburn applecultivar is discovered as achance seedling in New Zealand.
• Last confirmed sighting of theCaribbean monk seal, atSerranilla Bank, betweenJamaica andNicaragua.^[8]

• Soviet scientists L. V. Radushkevich and V. M. Lukyanovich publish images ofcarbon nanotubes.^[9]

• The firstautocode and its compiler are developed byAlick Glennie for theManchester Mark 1 computer, considered as the first working high-levelcompiledprogramming language.^[10]

• Discovery byDerek J. de Solla Price of a lost medieval scientific work entitledEquatorie of the Planetis, initially attributed toGeoffrey Chaucer.

• John Forbes Nash, Jr. produces groundbreaking work in the area of realalgebraic geometry.^[11][12]
• TheBradley–Terry model inprobability theory is presented.^[13]

• February 6 – Amechanical heart is used for the first time in a human patient, in the United States.^[14]
• March 1 – TheBritish Psychological Society is founded.
• September 2 – The first successful operation to correct acardiac shunt ("hole in the heart") is performed by Drs F. John Lewis andC. Walton Lillehei on a 5-year-old girl in the United States utilising the inducedhypothermia technique developed byWilfred Gordon "Bill" Bigelow.
• November –Royal College of General Practitioners established in the United Kingdom.
• November 20 – The first successful sex reassignment surgery is performed inCopenhagen, making George Jorgensen Jr. becomeChristine Jorgensen.
• December 14 – The first successful surgical separation ofconjoined twins is conducted in Mount Sinai Hospital,Cleveland,Ohio.
• December –Robert Gwyn Macfarlane and colleagues publish the first identification ofHaemophilia B.^[15]
• American obstetricalanesthesiologist Dr.Virginia Apgar devises theApgar score as a simple replicable method of quickly and summarily assessing the health of babies immediately afterchildbirth.^[16][17]
• American orthopedic surgeon Armin Klein publishesKlein's line as a diagnostic tool.
• Jean Delay, head of psychiatry at Sainte-Anne Hospital, Paris, with Jean-François Buisson, reports theantidepressant effect ofisoniazid.^[18]

• November 1 –Nuclear testing:Operation Ivy – The United States successfully detonates the firsthydrogen device, codenamed "Ivy Mike" ["m" for megaton], atEniwetok island in theBikini Atoll located in the Pacific Ocean.^[19] The elementseinsteinium andfermium are discovered in the fallout.^[20]
• Geoffrey Dummer proposes theintegrated circuit.^[21]

• September 30 – TheCineramawidescreen film system, developed byFred Waller, debuts with the movieThis Is Cinerama at theBroadway Theatre in New York City.
• October 7 – Thebarcode ispatented in the United States byNorman J. Woodland andBernard Silver,^[22] though it does not make its first appearance in an American shop until1974.^[23]

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

• February 2 –Ralph Merkle,American computer scientist, co-inventor ofpublic-key cryptography.
• February 15 –Frances Ashcroft,Englishgeneticist.
• February 19 –Marcia McNutt, Americangeophysicist, science editor, and president of theNational Academy of Sciences.
• February 28 –Simon P. Norton (died2019), Englishmathematician, co-discoverer of 'monstrous moonshine'.
• March 24 –Reinhard Genzel,Germanastrophysicist,Nobel Prize in Physics, co-discovererer ofblack holes.
• March 26 –Gary Ruvkun, Americanmolecular biologist,Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• July 15 –Ann Dowling, English mechanical engineer.
• August 14 –Peter Fonagy, Hungarian-born British psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist.
• August 25 –Charles M. Rice, Americanvirologist,Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, co-discovererer of thehepatitis C virus.
• Venki Ramakrishnan, Indian-born American-British structural biologist.

• March 5 –Sir Charles Sherrington (born1857), Englishneurophysiologist andbacteriologist,Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1932.
• April 2 –Bernard Lyot (born1897), French astronomer.
• April 8 –Tadeusz Estreicher (born1871), Polish chemist.
• June 17 –Jack Parsons (born1914), American rocket engineer and occultist.
• September 5 –Hermann Stieve (born1886),Germananatomist andhistologist.
• November 2 –Chaim Weizmann (born1874), Belarusian-bornchemist, firstPresident of Israel.
• November 24 –André Rochon-Duvigneaud (born1863), Frenchophthalmologist.
• December 4 –Karen Horney (born1885), German Americanpsychoanalyst.
• December 19 –Colonel Sir Charles Arden-Close (born1865), Britishcartographer.

• 1952 in science
• 20th century in science
• 1950s in science

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