1948 in science

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The year 1948 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• August 7 – Teaching and research in Mendelian genetics is prohibited in the Soviet Union in favour of Lysenkoist theories of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
• October 5 – Delegates to a conference organised by Sir Julian Huxley at Fontainebleau agree to formation of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
• November 20 – The Takahē, a flightless bird generally thought to have been extinct for fifty years, is rediscovered by Geoffrey Orbell near Lake Te Anau in the South Island of New Zealand.
• Publication of Fairfield Osborne's Our Plundered Planet, a Malthusian critique of human environmental destruction.

Computer science

• June 21 – World's first working program run on an electronic stored-program computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine ("Baby") (written by Tom Kilburn).
• July–October – Claude E. Shannon publishes "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in Bell System Technical Journal, regarded as a foundation of information theory, introducing the concept of Shannon entropy and adopting the term Bit.

History of science

• December 17 – The original Wright Flyer goes on display in the Smithsonian Institution.

Medicine and human sciences

• April 7 – The World Health Organization is established by the United Nations.
• July 5 – The National Health Service begins functioning in the United Kingdom, giving the right to universal healthcare, free at point of use.
• August 30 – Russian scientist Victor Skumin first describes "cardioprosthetic psychopathological syndrome", later known as Skumin syndrome, a form of anxiety suffered by recipients of artificial heart valves.
• In psychology, Bertram Forer demonstrates the Forer effect (that people tend to accept generalised descriptions of personality as uniquely applicable to themselves).
• Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, is published in the United States.
• Julius Axelrod and Bernard Brodie identify the analgesic properties of acetaminophen.

Meteorology

• March 25 – Meteorologists at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City issue the world's first tornado forecast, for the second of the 1948 Tinker Air Force Base tornadoes.

Physics

• April 1 – Physicists Ralph Asher Alpher and George Gamow publish the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper about the Big Bang.
• Herbert Fröhlich makes a key breakthrough in understanding superconductivity, at the University of Liverpool.

Technology

• June 18 – Columbia Records unveil the LP records developed by Peter Goldmark of CBS Laboratories.

Publications

• First publication of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
• Publication in Britain of the novel No Highway by former aeronautical engineer Nevil Shute, dealing with the effects of metal fatigue on aircraft.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett
  • Chemistry – Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius
  • Medicine – Paul Hermann Müller

Births

• March 9 – László Lovász, Hungarian computer scientist.
• April 18 – Yasumasa Kanada, Japanese mathematician.
• June 13 – Nina L. Etkin (died 2009), American anthropologist and biologist.
• June 28 – Kenneth Alan Ribet, American mathematician.
• August 25 – Nicholas A. Peppas, Greek chemical and biomedical engineer.
• August 29 – Robert S. Langer, American biomedical engineer.
• September 2 – Christa McAuliffe, born Sharon Christa Corrigan (died 1986), American astronaut.
• October 29 – Frans de Waal, Dutch primatologist.
• December 30 – Randy Schekman, American cell biologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• Margaret Allen, American cardiothoracic surgeon.
• Robert Plomin, American-born psychologist.

Deaths

• January 30 – Orville Wright (born 1871), American pioneer aviator.
• May 26 – Sir George Newman (born 1870), English public health physician.
• June 10 – Philippa Fawcett (born 1868), English mathematician.
• June 21 – D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (born 1860), Scottish biologist.
• December 12 – Marjory Stephenson (born 1885), English biochemist.