1952 in science

The year 1952 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

Soviet scientists L. V. Radushkevich and V. M. Lukyanovich publish images of carbon nanotubes.

The first autocode and its compiler are developed by Alick Glennie for the Manchester Mark 1 computer, considered as the first working high-level compiled programming language.

Discovery by Derek J. de Solla Price of a lost medieval scientific work entitled Equatorie of the Planetis, initially attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer.

February 6 – A mechanical heart is used for the first time in a human patient, in the United States.
March 1 – The British Psychological Society is founded.
April 26 – The link between coeliac disease and the gluten element of wheat is published by a team at the University of Birmingham.
September 2 – The first successful operation to correct a cardiac shunt is performed by Drs F. John Lewis and C. Walton Lillehei on a 5-year-old girl in the United States utilising the induced hypothermia technique developed by Wilfred Gordon "Bill" Bigelow.
November – Royal College of General Practitioners established in the United Kingdom.
November 20 – The first successful sex reassignment surgery is performed in Copenhagen, making George Jorgensen Jr. become Christine Jorgensen.
December 14 – The first successful surgical separation of conjoined twins is conducted in Mount Sinai Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio.
December – Robert Gwyn Macfarlane and colleagues publish the first identification of Haemophilia B.
American obstetrical anesthesiologist Dr. Virginia Apgar devises the Apgar score as a simple replicable method of quickly and summarily assessing the health of babies immediately after childbirth.
American orthopedic surgeon Armin Klein publishes Klein's line as a diagnostic tool.
Jean Delay, head of psychiatry at Sainte-Anne Hospital, Paris, with Jean-François Buisson, reports the antidepressant effect of isoniazid.

November 1 – Nuclear testing: Operation Ivy – The United States successfully detonates the first hydrogen device, codenamed "Ivy Mike", at Eniwetok island in the Bikini Atoll located in the Pacific Ocean. The elements einsteinium and fermium are discovered in the fallout.
Geoffrey Dummer proposes the integrated circuit.

September 30 – The Cinerama widescreen film system, developed by Fred Waller, debuts with the movie This Is Cinerama at the Broadway Theatre in New York City.
October 7 – The barcode is patented in the United States by Norman J. Woodland and Bernard Silver, though it does not make its first appearance in an American shop until 1974.

February 2 – Ralph Merkle, American computer scientist, co-inventor of public-key cryptography.
February 15 – Frances Ashcroft, English geneticist.
February 19 – Marcia McNutt, American geophysicist, science editor, and president of the National Academy of Sciences.
February 28 – Simon P. Norton, English mathematician, co-discoverer of 'monstrous moonshine'.
March 24 – Reinhard Genzel, German astrophysicist, Nobel Prize in Physics, co-discovererer of black holes.
March 26 – Gary Ruvkun, American molecular biologist, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
July 15 – Ann Dowling, English mechanical engineer.
August 14 – Peter Fonagy, Hungarian-born British psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist.
August 25 – Charles M. Rice, American virologist, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, co-discovererer of the hepatitis C virus.
Venki Ramakrishnan, Indian-born American-British structural biologist.