1964 in science

The year 1964 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

* March 20 - The precursor of the European Space Agency, ESRO (European Space Research Organization) is established per an agreement signed on June 14, 1962.
* July 31 - Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the Moon (images are 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from Earth-bound telescopes).
* October 12 - The Soviet Union launches the Voskhod 1 into Earth orbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew and the first flight without space suits.

Computer science

* April 7 - IBM announces the System/360, in six models with 32-bit architecture.
* May 1 - John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz run the first program created in BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an easy to learn high level programming language that will eventually be included on many computers and even some games consoles.
* PL/I (Programming Language I), a block-structured computer language, is created by George Radin, while at IBM.

Medicine

*January 11 - U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry reports that smoking may be hazardous for one's health in the first such statement from U.S. federal government.
*Jerome Horowitz synthesizes AZT, an antiviral drug that would come to be used in treating HIV.
*Lesch-Nyhan syndrome is first described, by Dr. Michael Lesch and Dr. William Nyhan.

Awards

* Nobel Prizes
** Physics - Charles Hard Townes, Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov, Aleksandr Prokhorov
** Chemistry - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
** Medicine - Konrad Bloch, Feodor Lynen

Births

* August 25 - Maxim Kontsevich, Russian mathematician.

Deaths

* December 1 - J. B. S. Haldane (b. 1892), British geneticist.
* December 17 - Victor Franz Hess (b. 1883), American physicist.