1953 in science

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The year 1953 involved numerous significant events in science and technology, including the first description of the DNA double helix, the discovery of neutrinos, and the release of the first polio vaccine.

Biology

• February 15 – Linus Pauling proposes a DNA triple helix structure,^[1] which is rapidly shown to be incorrect.

25 April 1953: the DNA double helix is first formally described.

• February 28 – Francis Crick and James Watson enter The Eagle, Cambridge, for a pub lunch announcing "We have discovered the secret of life."^[2]
• April 25 – Francis Crick and James D. Watson of the U.K. Medical Research Council's Unit for Research on the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems at the Cavendish Laboratory in the University of Cambridge publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" in the British journal Nature.^[3] Their work is often ranked as one of the most dramatic biological discoveries of the 20th century, because of the structural beauty and functional logic of the DNA double helix.^[4] In 1962, they will share the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Maurice Wilkins, who publishes X-ray crystallography results for DNA in the same issue of Nature in 1953.^[5] The third related article published at the same time is by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, on "Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate".^[6][7]

Chemistry

• May 15 – Stanley Miller publishes results from the Miller–Urey experiment in the journal Science. These surprise many chemists, by showing that organic molecules present in living organisms can form easily from simple inorganic chemicals.^[8]
• Rudolph Pariser, Robert G. Parr and John Pople publish their computational quantum chemistry theory for approximating molecular orbitals.^[9][10]
• Ziegler–Natta catalyst invented by Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta.^[11]

Computer sciences

• October – UNIVAC 1103 launched.
• Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester completes a device called MEG, which performs floating-point calculations. This machine evolves into the first transistorized computer, the Metro-Vickers MV950, ultimately leading to the mass production of computers.
• Alan Turing publishes an article describing the first 1,104 zeroes of the Riemann zeta-function, the culmination of fifteen years of work on how to use computers to tackle a fundamental problem in number theory.^[12]

Earth sciences

• Maurice Ewing and Bruce Heezen discover the deep canyon running along the center of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an important contribution to the theory of plate tectonics.^[13]

Mathematics

• Klaus Roth publishes a theorem regarded as a milestone in arithmetic combinatorics.^[14][15]

Medicine and human sciences

• February 13 – Christine Jorgensen, the first widely known American transsexual, returns to New York after successful sexual reassignment surgery in Denmark.
• March 26 – Jonas Salk announces his polio vaccine.
• May 6 – The first successful open heart surgery on a human utilizing a cardiopulmonary bypass pump ("heart-lung machine") is performed by John Gibbon at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia when he repairs an atrial septal defect in 18-year-old Cecilia Bavolek.^[16][17]
• July 11 – Andrew Watt Kay publishes his augmented histamine test.^[18]
• August 18 – The second of the controversial Kinsey Reports on human sexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, is published in the United States.
• September 1 – American neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville performs an experimental segmental resection on Henry Molaison ("H.M.") at Hartford Hospital (Connecticut) in an attempt to control his severe epilepsy, involving removal of most of H.M.'s medial temporal lobes on both hemispheres including the hippocampi, amygdalae and entorhinal cortex (the major sensory input to the hippocampi), and rendering him a continuing subject for the study of memory formation and cognitive neuropsychology.^[19]
• September 4 – The discovery of REM sleep is first published by researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago.^[20]
• American scientist Winston Price isolates the first rhinovirus, the most prevalent cause of the common cold.^[21]
• Cincinnati psychiatrist Max Lurie and Harry Salzer coin the term antidepressant.^[22]
• B. F. Skinner publishes the book Science and Human Behavior,^[23] a controversial attempt to apply the results of behavioral studies of laboratory animals to human psychology.

Paleontology

• 20 November – Authorities at the Natural History Museum in London announce that the skull of Piltdown Man (allegedly an early human discovered in 1912) is a hoax.^{[24][25][26][27]}

Physics

• Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan perform the first neutrino detection experiments, constructing the first neutrino detector (a cadmium-water target) and using the Hanford Site nuclear facility in Washington state as the neutrino source.^[28] This work, first discussed with Enrico Fermi and others in 1951–2, leads to the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, Stanislaw Ulam, and Mary Tsingou conduct computer simulations of a vibrating string that included a non-linear term in what became known as the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou experiment.
• Charles Kittel publishes his influential textbook Introduction to Solid State Physics in the United States.

Technology

• September 16 – Epic film The Robe is released in the United States as the first widescreen anamorphic format movie, filmed in CinemaScope.
• December 17 – The NTSC color television standard is agreed for the United States.
• J. C. Bamford of England introduce the backhoe loader.
• The Jet Propulsion Laboratory completes development of the SSM-A-17 Corporal I rocket. This is the first American surface-to-surface ballistic missile, powered by a liquid-fuelled motor utilizing nitric acid as the oxidizer.

Events

• January 13 – "Doctors' plot": The state newspaper Pravda publishes an article alleging that many of the Soviet Union's top doctors are part of a major plot to poison the country's senior political and military leaders.^[29]
• February 16 – The Pakistan Academy of Sciences is established.
• October 9 – As part of an extended series of publications on science, Pope Pius XII publishes "The Technician", which instructs scientists to restrict themselves to the study of physical matter and do nothing to undermine the idea of a non-material soul or a Superior Being. "The Technician" is delivered as a papal address on October 9.
• Rudolf Carnap publishes an article called "Testability and Meaning" in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, which moves away from the philosophical position of logical positivism with respect to science (particularly the heavily mathematical sciences, such as physics). Carnap instead emphasizes the idea that progress in science depends on the gradual accumulation of many small results that support human understanding of the world, a view more in line with Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the biological sciences.

Prizes

Nobel Prize

Main articles: List of Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine, List of Nobel laureates in Physics, and List of Nobel laureates in Chemistry

• 1953 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Hans Adolf Krebs and Fritz Albert Lipmann
• 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics: Frits Zernike
• 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Hermann Staudinger

Births

• January 2 – Vincent Racaniello, American virologist.
• January 17 – Ingeborg Hochmair (née Desoyer), Austrian electrical engineer.
• January 21 – Paul Allen, American entrepreneur, co-founder of Microsoft (d. 2018).
• January 25 – Mark Walport, English medical scientist and Government Chief Scientific Adviser (United Kingdom).
• May 14 – Martin Page, English botanist.
• May 15 – Athene Donald (née Griffith), English experimental physicist.
• May 17 – Maria Petrou, Anglo-Greek artificial intelligence researcher (d. 2012).^[30]
• May 18 – David Deutsch, Israeli-born quantum physicist.
• August 16 – David Spiegelhalter, English statistician.
• December 1 – Victor Ambros, American developmental biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• Pat Nuttall, British virologist and acarologist.

Deaths

• January 16 – Solomon Carter Fuller, African American psychiatrist (b. 1872).
• February 25 – Sergei Winogradsky, Russian microbiologist (b. 1856).
• April 17 – Sven Gustaf Wingqvist, Swedish engineer, inventor and industrialist (b. 1876).
• April 22 – Jan Czochralski, Polish–German discoverer of the Czochralski process for growing crystals (b. 1885).
• August 15 – Ludwig Prandtl, German physicist (b. 1875).
• September 28 – Edwin Hubble, American astronomer (b. 1889).
• September 30 – Lewis Fry Richardson, English mathematical physicist (b. 1881).
• October 30 – Alice Eastwood, Canadian American botanist (b. 1859).
• November 13 – Herbert E. Ives, American optical engineer (b. 1882).

See also

• List of years in science
• 1953 in spaceflight

References

1. Pauling, Linus; Corey, Robert B. (1953-02-15). "A Proposed Structure For The Nucleic Acids". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 39 (2): 84–97.
2. Watson, James (1968). The Double Helix.
3. Watson, J. D.; Crick, F. H. C. (1953). "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid". Nature. 171 (4356): 737–738. Bibcode:1953Natur.171..737W. doi:10.1038/171737a0. PMID 13054692. S2CID 4253007.
4. "Scientists describe 'secret of life'". On This Day. BBC. April 25, 1953. Archived from the original on December 22, 2007. Retrieved January 10, 2008.
5. Wilkins, M. H. F.; Stokes, A. R.; Wilson, H. R. (1953). "Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids" (PDF). Nature. 171 (4356): 738–740. Bibcode:1953Natur.171..738W. doi:10.1038/171738a0. PMID 13054693. S2CID 4280080. Retrieved March 1, 2011.
6. Franklin, Rosalind E.; Gosling, R. G. (1953). "Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate" (PDF). Nature. 171 (4356): 740–741. Bibcode:1953Natur.171..740F. doi:10.1038/171740a0. PMID 13054694. S2CID 4268222. Retrieved March 1, 2011.
7. Francis Crick (1916–2004) and James Watson (b. 1928) together discovered the double helix structure of DNA, the "blueprint of life." Surprisingly, when ... Archived 2015-04-07 at the Wayback Machine history1900s.about.com
8. Miller, Stanley L. (1953). "A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions". Science. 117 (3046): 528–9. Bibcode:1953Sci...117..528M. doi:10.1126/science.117.3046.528. JSTOR 1680569. PMID 13056598. S2CID 38897285.
9. Pariser R.; Parr R. G. (1953). "A Semi‐Empirical Theory of the Electronic Spectra and Electronic Structure of Complex Unsaturated Molecules. II". Journal of Chemical Physics. 21 (5): 767. Bibcode:1953JChPh..21..767P. doi:10.1063/1.1699030.
10. Pople, J. A. (1953). "Electron interaction in unsaturated hydrocarbons". Transactions of the Faraday Society. 49: 1375. doi:10.1039/tf9534901375.
11. Cecchin, Giuliano; Morini, Giampiero; Piemontesi, Fabrizio (2003). "Ziegler–Natta Catalysts". Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology. Wiley-VCH. doi:10.1002/0471238961.2609050703050303.a01. ISBN 0471238961.
12. Turing, Alan M. (1953). "Some calculations of the Riemann zeta-function". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. 3: 99–117. doi:10.1112/plms/s3-3.1.99.
13. Ewing, Maurice; Heezen, Bruce C.; Ericson, D. B.; Northrop, John; Dorman, James (July 1953). "Exploration of the Northwest Atlantic Mid-ocean Canyon". Bulletin of the Geological Society of America. 64 (7): 865–868. Bibcode:1953GSAB...64..865E. doi:10.1130/0016-7606(1953)64[865:EOTNAM]2.0.CO;2. ISSN 0016-7606.
14. Roth, K. F. (1953). "On certain sets of integers". Journal of the London Mathematical Society. 2nd series. 28: 104–109. doi:10.1112/jlms/s1-28.1.104. MR 0051853.
15. Chen, William; Vaughan, Robert (2017-06-14). "Klaus Friedrich Roth, 29 October 1925–10 November 2015". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 63: 487–525. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2017.0014. ISSN 0080-4606.
16. Cohn, Lawrence H. (May 2003). "Fifty years of open-heart surgery". Circulation. 107 (17): 2168–70. doi:10.1161/01.CIR.0000071746.50876.E2. PMID 12732590. Retrieved April 15, 2013.
17. Levy, Adam (12 January 2021). "The heart of invention". Knowable Magazine. doi:10.1146/knowable-011221-1. Retrieved 25 March 2022.
18. Kay, A. W. (1953). "Effect of Large Doses of Histamine on Gastric Secretion of HCl". British Medical Journal. 2 (4827): 77–80. doi:10.1136/bmj.2.4827.77. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 2028464. PMID 13051582.
19. Scoville, William Beecher; Milner, Brenda (1957). "Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions". Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. 20 (1): 11–21. doi:10.1136/jnnp.20.1.11. PMC 497229. PMID 13406589.
20. Aserinsky, Eugene; Kleitman, Nathaniel (1953). "Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena, During Sleep". Science. 118 (3062): 273–274. Bibcode:1953Sci...118..273A. doi:10.1126/science.118.3062.273. JSTOR 1680525. PMID 13089671. S2CID 43636051.
21. Davison, Nicola (2017-10-06). "Why can't we cure the common cold?". The Guardian. London. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-02-20.
22. Healy, D. (2001). "The Antidepressant Drama". In Weissman, M.M. (ed.). The treatment of depression: bridging the 21st century. American Psychiatric Pub. pp. 10–11. ISBN 978-0-88048-397-1. Retrieved May 28, 2009.
23. Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-02-929040-6.
24. Weiner, J. S.; Oakley, K. P.; Le Gros Clark, W. E. (1953-11-20). "The Solution of the Piltdown Problem". Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Geology Series. 2 (3): 141–6.
25. "Piltdown Man forgery". The Times. London. 1953-11-21. p. 6.
26. "End as a Man". Time. 1953-11-30. Archived from the original on 2010-10-30. Retrieved 2010-11-11.
27. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 978-0-14-102715-9.
28. Reines, F.; Cowan, C. L. Jr. (November 1953). "Detection of the Free Neutrino". Physical Review. 92 (3): 830–831. Bibcode:1953PhRv...92..830R. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.92.830.
29. "Doctors' Plot | alleged conspiracy, Soviet Union [1953]". Encyclopædia Britannica. 20 July 1998. Archived from the original on 2015-09-06.
30. "Professor Maria Petrou". The Daily Telegraph. London. 2012-11-11. Retrieved 2012-11-11.