1952 in science

Biology

• August 1 – Around 9 o'clock AM Pacific Time Zone, 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.
• October – Danish virologist Preben von Magnus publishes his observation of the von Magnus phenomenon producing defective interfering particles.
• 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.
• Last confirmed sighting of the Caribbean monk seal, at Serranilla Bank, between Jamaica and Nicaragua.

  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 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 – Royal College of General Practitioners established in the United Kingdom.
• November 20 – The first successful sex reassignment 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.
• American orthopedic surgeon Armin Klein publishes Klein's line as a diagnostic tool.
• 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" , 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 2 – Ralph Merkle, American computer scientist, co-inventor of public-key cryptography.
• February 15 – Frances Ashcroft, English geneticist.
• February 19 – Marcia McNutt, American geophysicist and science editor.
• February 28 – Simon P. Norton, English mathematician, co-discoverer of 'monstrous moonshine'.
• July 15 – Ann Dowling, English mechanical engineer.
• August 14 – Peter Fonagy, Hungarian-born British psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist.
• Venki Ramakrishnan, Indian-born American-British structural biologist.

  Deaths

• March 5 – Sir Charles Sherrington, English neurophysiologist and bacteriologist, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1932.
• June 17 – Jack Parsons, American rocket engineer and occultist.
• September 5 – Hermann Stieve, German anatomist and histologist.
• November 2 – Chaim Weizmann, Belarusian-born chemist, first President of Israel.
• December 4 – Karen Horney, German American psychoanalyst.
• December 19 – Colonel Sir Charles Arden-Close, British cartographer.