- 1964 in science
The year 1964 in
science andtechnology involved some significant events, listed below.Astronomy and space exploration
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March 20 - The precursor of theEuropean Space Agency ,ESRO (European Space Research Organization) is established per an agreement signed onJune 14 ,1962 .
*July 31 -Ranger program :Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of theMoon (images are 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from Earth-boundtelescope s).
*October 12 - The Soviet Union launches theVoskhod 1 into Earthorbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew and the first flight withoutspace suit s.Computer science
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April 7 -IBM announces theSystem/360 , in six models with 32-bit architecture.
*May 1 -John George Kemeny andThomas Eugene Kurtz run the first program created in BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an easy to learn high levelprogramming language that will eventually be included on manycomputer s and even some games consoles.
*PL/I (Programming Language I), a block-structured computer language, is created byGeorge Radin , while atIBM .Medicine
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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 synthesizesAZT , an antiviral drug that would come to be used in treatingHIV .
*Lesch-Nyhan syndrome is first described, by Dr. Michael Lesch and Dr. William Nyhan.Awards
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Nobel Prize s
** Physics -Charles Hard Townes ,Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov , Aleksandr Prokhorov
** Chemistry -Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
** Medicine -Konrad Bloch ,Feodor Lynen Births
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August 25 -Maxim Kontsevich ,Russia nmathematician .Deaths
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December 1 -J. B. S. Haldane (b. 1892), Britishgeneticist .
*December 17 -Victor Franz Hess (b. 1883), Americanphysicist .
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