1960 in science

List of years in science (table)
... 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 ... 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 ... 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 ...
Art Archaeology Architecture Literature Music Philosophy Science +...

The year 1960 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• August 11 – The return capsule of the U.S. Discoverer 13 Corona mission is successfully recovered from the Pacific Ocean, the first time any man-made object has been recovered successfully from orbit.
• September – A Soviet SS-2 Sibling missile is successfully launched in a suborbital test from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the first Chinese spaceflight.
• October 4 – The U.S. Army Courier 1B, the world's first active communications repeater satellite, is launched into low earth orbit.

Biology

• February 13
  • Max Perutz publishes the structure of hemoglobin.
  • John Kendrew publishes the structure of myoglobin.
• March 5 – British marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy announces his aquatic ape hypothesis, theorising that swimming and diving for food exerted a strong evolutionary effect partly responsible for the divergence in the common descent of humans and other great apes.
• July – Robert Burns Woodward publishes a total synthesis of chlorophyll.
• July 14 – English primatologist Jane Goodall arrives at what will become Gombe Stream National Park in Tanganyika to begin her groundbreaking behavioral study of chimpanzees in the wild.
• November 4 – At the Kasakela Chimpanzee Community, Jane Goodall observes a chimpanzee using a grass stalk to extract termites from a termite hill, the first recorded case of tool use by animals.
• Jacques Ruffié invents hemotyping.
• Juan Oro finds that concentrated solutions of ammonium cyanide in water can produce the nucleotide adenine.
• Four independent researchers (Sam Weiss, Jerard Hurwitz, Audrey Stevens and J. Bonner) discover the bacterial RNA polymerase that regulates the polymerization of nucleotides under the control of DNA.
• Climatron geodesic dome greenhouse opens at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

Computer science

• August – Edsger W. Dijkstra and Jaap A. Zonneveld produce the first (X1) implementation of the ALGOL 60 programming language.
• John McCarthy of MIT publishes the Lisp programming language.

Earth sciences

• May 22 – Valdivia earthquake: Chile's subduction fault ruptures from Talcahuano to the Taitao Peninsula (with its epicenter near Lumaco), causing the most powerful earthquake on record (with a magnitude of 9.5) and a tsunami.
• Harry Hammond Hess proposes the concept of seafloor spreading.

Exploration

• January 23 – Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reach bottom in the Mariana Trench in United States Navy bathyscaphe Trieste at a depth of 10,916 m.
• May 10 – The nuclear submarine USS Triton, under the command of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., completes the first underwater circumnavigation of the Earth.

Mathematics

• Wacław Sierpiński proves the existence of Sierpinski numbers.
• In the classification of finite simple groups, Michio Suzuki and Rimhak Ree introduce Suzuki–Ree groups; and John G. Thompson, Walter Feit and Marshall Hall prove that a group with a fixed-point-free automorphism of prime order is nilpotent, and that all finite simple CN groups of odd order are cyclic.

Medicine

• April 15 – William C. Chardack implants the first fixed-rate cardiac pacemaker with mercury battery, designed by Wilson Greatbatch.
• May 2 – The first coronary artery bypass surgery is performed by a team led by Dr. Robert Goetz and thoracic surgeon Dr. Michael Rohman with the assistance of Drs. Jordan Haller and Ronald Dee at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Bronx Municipal Hospital Center in the United States using internal mammary artery as the donor vessel; the patient survives for 9 months.
• May 9 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces that it will approve birth control as an additional indication for Searle's Enovid, making it the world's first approved combined oral contraceptive pill.
• June 6 – The American Heart Association announces a strong statistical association between heavy cigarette smoking and coronary heart disease.
• October 30 – The first kidney transplantation in the United Kingdom is performed by a team led by English surgeon Michael Woodruff at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh between identical twins.

Meteorology

• April 1 – The United States launches the first weather satellite, TIROS-1.

Metrology

• October – 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures establishes International System of Units, abbreviated SI from the French name, Le Système international d'unités.

Paleontology

• November 4 – OH 7, first fragments of Homo habilis, discovered by Jonathan Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.

Physics

• March 22 – Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes receive the first patent for a laser.
• May 16 – Theodore Maiman demonstrates the first working laser, a ruby laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories.

Technology

• A tungsten halogen lamp bulb is patented by General Electric engineer Fredrick Moby.
• Prototype Pentax Spotmatic single-lens reflex camera, pioneering through-the-lens metering, is presented.

Births

• May 3 – Jaron Lanier, American computer scientist.
• October 18 – Craig Mello, American biologist.
• December 24 – Carol Vorderman, British mathematician.

Deaths

• April 24 – Max von Laue (born 1879), German physicist, winner of the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• May 8 – J. H. C. Whitehead (born 1904), British mathematician.
• June 17 – Sir Harold Gillies (born 1882), New Zealand-born plastic surgeon.