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 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.