1964 in science - Definition and Overview

The year 1964 in science and technology included many events, some of which are listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• March 20 - The precursor of the European Space Agency, ESRO (European Space Research Organization) is established per an agreement signed on June 14, 1962.
• July 31 - Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the Moon (images are 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from Earth-bound telescopes).
• October 12 - The Soviet Union launches the Voskhod 1 into Earth orbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew and the first flight without space suits.

Computer science

• April 7 - IBM announces the System/360.
• John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz create BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an easy to learn high level programming language that has been included on many computers and even some games consoles.

Medicine

• January 11 - U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry reports that smoking may be hazardous for one's health in the first such statement from U.S. federal government.
• Jerome Horowitz synthesizes AZT, an antiviral drug that would come to be used in treating HIV.
• Lesch-Nyhan syndrome is first described, by Dr. Michael Lesch and Dr. William Nyhan.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Charles Hard Townes, Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov, Aleksandr Prokhorov
  • Chemistry - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
  • Medicine - Konrad Bloch, Feodor Lynen

Births

• August 25 - Maxim Kontsevich, Russian mathematician.

Deaths

• December 1 - J. B. S. Haldane (b. 1892), British geneticist.
• December 17 - Victor Franz Hess (b. 1883), American physicist.