1953 in Science - Events, Discoveries and Inventions

Events, Discoveries and Inventions

• 16 February – The Pakistan Academy of Sciences is established.
• 26 March – Jonas Salk announces his polio vaccine.
• 25 April – Francis Crick and James D. Watson of the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" in the British journal Nature. Their work is often ranked as one of the most dramatic biological discoveries of the 20th century, because of the structural beauty and functional logic of the DNA double helix. In 1962, they shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Maurice Wilkins, who published X-ray crystallography results for DNA in the same issue of Nature in 1953. The third related article published at the same time is by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, on "Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate".
• 15 May— Stanley Miller publishes results from the Miller-Urey experiment in the journal Science. These surprise many chemists, by showing that organic molecules present in living organisms can form easily from simple inorganic chemicals.
• 18 August – The second Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, is published in the United States.
• 4 September – The discovery of REM sleep is first published by researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago.
• 9 October – As part of an extended series of publications on science, Pope Pius XII publishes "The Technician", which instructs scientists to restrict themselves to the study of physical matter and do nothing to undermine the idea of a non-material soul or a Superior Being. "The Technician" is delivered as a papal address on October 9.
• 21 November – Authorities at the Natural History Museum in London announce that the skull of Piltdown Man (discovered in 1912) is a hoax.
• 17 December – the NTSC color television standard is agreed for the United States.