2000 in science

Astronomy and space exploration

• May 4 – A rare astronomical conjunction occurs on the New Moon including all seven of the traditional celestial bodies known from ancient times until the discovery of Uranus in 1781; this conjunction consists of the Sun and Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
• August 10 – Publication of the M-sigma relation in The Astrophysical Journal.

  Biology

• June 26 – 'Rough draft' of the human genome is announced jointly by President of the United States Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
• December 14 – The full genome sequence of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana is published in Nature.
• 10-year Census of Marine Life launched.

  Computer science

• March 4 – Sony Computer Entertainment releases the PlayStation 2 sixth generation home video game console in Japan.
• March 14 – Stephen King's horror story Riding the Bullet is published in e-book format only, the world's first mass-market electronic book.

  Earth sciences

• March – Iceberg B-15, with a surface area of 11,000 km², calves from the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica.
• April – Cave of the Crystals discovered at the Naica Mine in Mexico.

  Medicine

• January – Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg publish "The Hallmarks of Cancer".
• January 31 – English doctor Harold Shipman is found guilty of killing fifteen of his elderly patients by lethal injections of diamorphine, the only British physician ever convicted of murdering his patients; he is actually considered to have killed at least 215.

  Paleontology

• First fossil of Orrorin, an early species of Homininae, discovered in the Tugen Hills of Kenya.

  Philosophy

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
• * Physics – Zhores Alferov, Herbert Kroemer - Jack Kilby
• * Chemistry – Alan J Heeger, Alan G MacDiarmid, Hideki Shirakawa
• * Medicine – Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, Eric R. Kandel
• Turing Award: Andrew Yao
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: William Sefton Fyfe

  Deaths

• January 12 – Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau, American chemical engineer
• January 19 – G. Ledyard Stebbins, American botanist and geneticist
• March 7 – W. D. Hamilton, English evolutionary biologist, widely recognised as one of the greatest evolutionary theorists of the 20th century
• March 10 – Nim Chimpsky, chimpanzee
• May 6 – John Clive Ward, English-born physicist
• May 19 – Yevgeny Khrunov, cosmonaut
• June 14 – Elsie Widdowson, English nutritionist
• July 8 – W. David Kingery, American materials scientist specializing in ceramic materials
• July 14 – Sir Mark Oliphant, Australian nuclear physicist
• July 29 – René Favaloro, Argentine cardiac surgeon
• September 20 – Gherman Titov, cosmonaut
• October 4 – Michael Smith, English-born Canadian chemist, 1993 Nobel Prize winner
• November 20 – Nikolay Dollezhal, a key figure in Soviet atomic bomb project and chief designer of nuclear reactors