2001 in science - Definition and Overview

Astronomy and space exploration

• Richard Ellis, Michael R. Santos, Jean-Paul Kneib, and Konrad Kuijken discover a star cluster 13.4 billion light years from Earth.
• NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touchdown in the "saddle" region of 433 Eros becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.
• Genesis spacecraft launched.
• NASA's Galileo spacecraft passes within 112 miles of Jupiter's moon Io.

Biology

• The publicly funded Human Genome Project, led by Francis Collins and the privately funded Celera effort, led by Craig Venter simultaneously publish their decoding of the human genome (in Nature and Science, respectively).
• Craig Venter and Mark Adams complete the genetic map of the laboratory mouse.
• Fossil remains of the whale Rodhocetus Balochistanensis found in Balochistan Province, Pakistan by Philip Gingerich.

Computer science

• In quantum computing, the first working 7-qubit NMR computer is demonstrated at IBM's Almaden Research Center, demonstrating Shor's algorithm

Medicine

• July 2 - World's first self-contained artificial heart implanted in Robert Tools.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Eric Allin Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, Carl E. Wieman
  • Chemistry - William S. Knowles, Ryoji Noyori, K. Barry Sharpless
  • Medicine - Leland H. Hartwell, R. Timothy Hunt, Paul M. Nurse
• Turing Award: Ole-Johan Dahl, Kristen Nygaard
• Wollaston Medal for Geology: Harry Blackmore Whittington

Births

Deaths

• February 22 - Claude E. Shannon (b. 1916), mathematician.
• May 28 - Francisco Varela (b. 1946), biologist and philosopher.
• August 20 - Fred Hoyle (b. 1915), astronomer and science fiction writer.
• September 2 - Christiaan Barnard (b. 1922), surgeon.
• November 30 - Robert Tools, first recipient of a self-contained artificial heart, at age 59 after 151 days without a living heart.
• December 5 - Franco Rasetti (b. 1901), physicist.