1922 in science

Archaeology

• November 4 – British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men find the entrance to King Tutankhamen's tomb in the Valley of the Kings of Egypt.

Biology

• August – The California grizzly bear is hunted to extinction.
• Last known wild Barbary lion shot in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
• The Amur tiger becomes extinct in South Korea.
• H. J. Muller sets out the basic properties of genetic heredity.

Chemistry

• June 20 – Degesch applies to patent the cyanide-based insecticide Zyklon B in Germany.
• Vitamin E is discovered by Herbert McLean Evans and Katharine Scott Bishop at the University of California, Berkeley and Vitamin D by Elmer McCollum and others.
• Czech chemist Jaroslav Heyrovský invents polarographic methods of chemical analysis.
• German chemist Hermann Staudinger proposes what he will come to call macromolecules.

Ethnology

• Bronisław Malinowski's influential ethnological text Argonauts of the Western Pacific is published.

Mathematics

• First publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in an English translation.
• Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg provides a proof of the "Lindeberg condition" of the central limit theorem.
• Ernst Steinitz proves Steinitz's theorem in polyhedral combinatorics.

Medicine

• January 11 – First successful insulin treatment of diabetes, by Frederick Banting in Toronto, using a pure preparation intravenously injected; on the same date Nicolae Paulescu makes an apparently successful rectal administration of an insulin preparation.

Meteorology

• English mathematical physicist Lewis Fry Richardson proposes a scheme for weather forecasting by solution of differential equations, the method used in modern times, in his work Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.

Paleontology

• First of four successive American Museum of Natural History expeditions to Mongolia under Roy Chapman Andrews which will discover fossils of Indricotherium, Protoceratops, a nest of Protoceratops eggs, Pinacosaurus, Saurornithoides, Oviraptor and Velociraptor, none of which were known before.

Physics

• Arthur Compton studies X-ray photon scattering by electrons.
• Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach show "space quantization".
• Hilding Faxén introduces Faxén's law for the velocity of a sphere in fluid dynamics.
• Albert Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity: Four Lectures Delivered at Princeton University, May 1921 is published by Princeton University Press.

Technology

• February 14 – The world's first regular wireless broadcasts for entertainment, made by Peter Eckersley, begin transmission on radio station 2MT from a hut at the Marconi Company laboratories at Writtle near Chelmsford in England. This is followed in the United Kingdom on May 11 by station 2LO from Marconi House in London, which from November 22 becomes the British Broadcasting Company.
• Lancia Lambda is the first automobile to use monocoque construction.
• Approximate date – Madeleine Vionnet introduces the bias cut dress in Paris.

Awards

• Nobel Prize
• * Physics – Niels Bohr
• * Chemistry – Francis William Aston
• * Physiology or Medicine – Archibald Vivian Hill and Otto Fritz Meyerhof

Births

• January 9 – Har Gobind Khorana, Indian-born biochemist and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate.
• February 12 – William Rashkind, American cardiologist.
• March 4 – Geoff Tootill, English computer scientist.
• March 7 – Olga Ladyzhenskaya, Russian mathematician.
• April 22 – Wolf V. Vishniac, American microbiologist.
• May 4 – Eugenie Clark, American ichthyologist.
• May 6 – Ralph F. Hirschmann, German American biochemist, leader of a team responsible for the first organic synthesis of an enzyme, a ribonuclease; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate.
• June 19 – Aage Bohr, Danish nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate.
• June 22 – Ewen Whitaker, English-born lunar astronomer.
• June 26 – Cuchlaine King, British geomorphologist.
• June 29 – San Baw, Burmese orthopaedic surgeon.
• July 9 – Kathleen Booth, English-born computer scientist.
• July 15 – Leon M. Lederman, American experimental physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate.
• July 18 – Thomas Kuhn, American philosopher of science.
• July 25 – John B. Goodenough, German-born American solid-state physicist and Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate.
• August 24 – Donald Henry Colless, Australian entomologist.
• September 2 – Arthur Ashkin, American physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate.
• September 5 – Denys Wilkinson, English nuclear physicist.
• November 8 – Christiaan Barnard, South African cardiac surgeon.
• November 15 – David Sidney Feingold, American biochemist and academic.
• November 26 – John D. Hoffman, American nuclear chemist.
• December 18 – Esther Lederberg, American microbiologist.

Deaths

• January 5 – Ernest Shackleton, Anglo-Irish explorer.
• January 15 – Edward Hopkinson, English electrical engineer.
• January 22 – Camille Jordan, French mathematician.
• April 1 – Hermann Rorschach, Swiss psychiatrist.
• April 9 – Sir Patrick Manson, Scottish-born "father of tropical medicine".
• May 26 – Ernest Solvay, Belgian chemist.
• June 18 – Jacobus Kapteyn, Dutch astronomer.
• August 2 – Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish American inventor.
• August 18 – W. H. Hudson, Anglo-Argentine naturalist.
• August 29 – Sophie Bryant, Anglo-Irish mathematician and educationalist.
• September 7 – William Stewart Halsted, American surgeon.
• October 25 – Oscar Hertwig, German zoologist.