# 1972 in science

The year 1972 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

## Astronomy and space exploration

* January 5 – President of the United States Richard Nixon orders the development of a Space Shuttle program.
* February 4 – Mariner 9 sends pictures from Mars.
* February 21 – The Soviet uncrewed spacecraft Luna 20 lands on the Moon.
* March 2 – Launch of Pioneer 10 spacecraft.
* April 16 – Apollo 16 launched.
* June 30 – The International Time Bureau adds the first leap second to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
* July 23 – The United States launches Landsat 1, the first Earth-resources satellite.
* December 7 – Apollo 17 launched with three astronauts and five mice, and The Blue Marble photograph of the Earth is taken.
* December 11 – NASA astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt land on the Moon and begin a three-day exploration.

## Biology

* February – S. J. Singer and Garth L. Nicolson describe the fluid mosaic model of the functional cell membrane.
* September – Geoffrey Burnstock proposes the existence of a non-adrenergic, non-cholinergic (NANC) neurotransmitter, which he identifies as adenosine triphosphate (ATP), originating the term 'purinergic signalling'.
* October 1 – The first publication reporting the production of a recombinant DNA molecule, by Paul Berg and colleagues, marks the birth of modern molecular biology methodology.
* Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould publish their landmark paper on punctuated equilibrium.
* Socorro doves (Zenaida graysoni) last seen in the wild. The species precariously survives in captivity. A reintroduction program is being prepared.

## Computer science

* April 6 – Cray Research founded.
* May – Magnavox release the first home video game console which can be connected to a television set – the Magnavox Odyssey, invented by Ralph H. Baer.
* July 12 – First C compiler released.
* October – The First International Conference on Computer Communications is held in Washington, D.C., and hosts the first public demonstration of ARPAnet, a precursor of the Internet.
* November 29 – Atari release the production version of Pong, one of the first video games, devised by Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn.
* Karen Spärck Jones introduces the concept of inverse document frequency (idf) weighting in information retrieval.
* Write-only memory is devised as a joke in Signetics.

## Earth sciences

* February 8 – First Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) defined at the Silurian-Devonian boundary at Klonk in the Czech Republic.

## Ecology

* January – A Blueprint for Survival first published as a special edition of The Ecologist magazine in the United Kingdom.
* James Lovelock first refers to the Gaia hypothesis in print.
* The Climatic Research Unit is founded by climatologist Hubert Lamb at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

## Mathematics

* Daniel Quillen formulates higher algebraic K-theory.
* Daniel Gorenstein announces a 16-step program for completing the classification of finite simple groups.
* Richard M. Karp shows that the Hamiltonian cycle problem is NP-complete.

## Medicine

* January 31 – Immunosuppressive effect of ciclosporin discovered by a team at Sandoz, Basel, under Hartmann F. Stähelin.
* Harvey J. Alter identifies the presence of hepatitis C virus.
* Tu Youyou and collaborators obtain a pure extract of the antiplasmodial drug artemisinin.
* Archie Cochrane publishes Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services in the U.K.
* John Yudkin publishes Pure, White and Deadly in the U.K., warning of the dangers of sucrose in diet.
* The last major epidemic of smallpox in Europe breaks out in Yugoslavia.

## Metrology

* 00:00:00 UTC matches 00:00:10 TAI exactly and the tick rate of UTC is changed to match TAI exactly.

## Paleontology

* Kielan-Jawarowska and Rinchen Barsbold report the associated remains of a Velociraptor and Protoceratops apparently killed and preserved while fighting.

## Psychology

* Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky begin to publish together on cognitive bias and heuristics in judgment and decision-making.

## Technology

* February 1 – The first scientific hand-held calculator (labeled Hewlett-Packard, later designated the HP-35) is introduced, at a price of $395.00.
* July 10 – Jack Cover files U.S. patent 3,803,463 for the original form of Taser electroshock weapon.
* English inventor Peter Powell develops a steerable dual-line kite.

## Awards

* Nobel Prizes
** Physics – John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, John Robert Schrieffer
** Chemistry – Christian B. Anfinsen, Stanford Moore, William H. Stein
** Medicine – Gerald Edelman, Rodney R Porter
* Turing Award – Edsger Dijkstra

## Births

* March 31 – Evan Williams, American Internet entrepreneur.
* April 5 – Nima Arkani-Hamed, Canadian-American theoretical physicist.
* June 21 – Warren Lyford DeLano, American bioinformatician and open source advocate (d. 2009).
* unknown date – Kathy Vivas, Venezuelan astrophysicist

## Deaths

* February 20 – Maria Goeppert Mayer (b. 1906), German-American theoretical physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
* May 4 – Edward Calvin Kendall (b. 1886), American chemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
* May 8 – Beatrice Helen Worsley (b. 1921), Canadian computer scientist.
* August 11 – Max Theiler (b. 1899), South African-born American virologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
* August 22 – Ștefan Procopiu (b. 18990), Romanian physicist.
* August 25 – Lucien Bull (b. 1876), Irish-born French pioneer in chronophotography.
* October 1 – Louis Leakey (b. 1903), British paleoanthropologist.
* November 25 – Henri Coandă (b. 1886), Romanian aeronautical engineer.