1967 in science

The year 1967 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Anthropology

• October 12 – Desmond Morris publishes The Naked Ape.^[1]

Astronomy and space exploration

• January 27 – Apollo 1 destroyed in a fire on the launch pad.
• January 27 – The USA, Soviet Union and UK sign the Outer Space Treaty.
• April 20 – Surveyor 3 probe lands on the Moon.
• April 24 – Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is killed during the landing of Soyuz 1.
• October 18 – The Soviet Venera 4 probe descends through the Venusian atmosphere, which it analyzes.
• October 19 – Mariner 5 probe flies by Venus.
• November 9 – Apollo program: NASA launches a Saturn V rocket carrying the unmanned Apollo 4 test spacecraft from Cape Kennedy.
• November – Pulsars discovered by Jocelyn Bell working with Antony Hewish at the University of Cambridge,^[2] for which Hewish is awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974. These rapidly pulsating radio sources are explained a year later as rotating neutron stars.
• NRAO builds the 36-foot Radio Telescope, later to become the ARO 12m Radio Telescope.

Biology

• Chimpanzee Washoe begins to learn American Sign Language.

Cartography

• Arno Peters reinvents the Gall orthographic equal-area projection.

Mathematics

• Errett Bishop publishes Foundations of Constructive Analysis, proving theorems in real analysis using constructive analysis.^[3]
• Michael Goldberg demonstrates that none of the original Malfatti circles are ever optimal.^[4]

Medicine

• May – Dr René Favaloro performs the first saphenous vein autograft in coronary artery bypass surgery, at the Cleveland Clinic in the United States.^[5]
• December 3 – Dr Christiaan Barnard and a team including his brother Marius perform the first successful human heart transplantation, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, on Louis Washkansky, who survives for eighteen days before dying of pneumonia.
• December 6 – Dr Adrian Kantrowitz performs the first pediatric heart transplant, at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, United States, on a 19-day-old infant, who survives for six hours.^[6][7]
• Thomas Starzl performs the first successful human liver transplantation, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
• First use, in a case of myocardial infarction, of the intra-aortic balloon pump invented by Dr Adrian Kantrowitz and his brother Arthur.^[8]
• Neurosurgeons Jean Talairach and Gabor Szikla create the Talairach coordinates for brain mapping.^[9]
• St Christopher's Hospice, the world's first purpose-built secular hospice specialising in palliative care of the terminally ill, is established in South London by Cicely Saunders.^[10]

Physics

• The electroweak interaction theory is introduced by Steven Weinberg.^[11]
• The Toda lattice is introduced by Morikazu Toda as a simple model for a one-dimensional crystal in solid state physics.^[12]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Hans Bethe
  • Chemistry – Manfred Eigen, Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, George Porter
  • Medicine – Ragnar Granit, Haldan Keffer Hartline, George Wald
• Turing Award – Maurice Vincent Wilkes

Births

• February 24 – Brian Schmidt, Australian winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics (2011).
• August 15 – Nicodemus Abel, Indian Plant geneticist.

Deaths

• January 3 – Reginald Punnett (born 1875), English geneticist.
• January 16 – Robert J. Van de Graaff (born 1901), American physicist.
• January 19 – Casimir Funk (born 1884), Polish biochemist, coined the term vitamin.
• January 27 – Apollo 1 crew
  • Edward White (born 1930)
  • Gus Grissom (born 1926)
  • Roger Chaffee (born 1935)
• February 18 – J. Robert Oppenheimer (born 1904), American physicist.
• March 27 – Jaroslav Heyrovský (born 1890), Czech chemist.
• April 5 – Hermann Joseph Muller (born 1890), American geneticist.
• April 24 – Vladimir Komarov (born 1927), cosmonaut on Soyuz 1.
• May 5 – Owen Thomas Jones (born 1878), Welsh geologist
• May 27 – Tilly Edinger (born 1897), German American paleoneurologist.
• August 22 – Gregory Goodwin Pincus (born 1903), American biologist who co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill.

References