(c) & Disclaimer: Note that this is a biased choice of dates relevant to biology, obtained by compiling many different sources, often using the original texts and not the WWW only; note that care has been taken to check information and rewrite it when needed, however it is likely that they still contain many errors; the links are chosen to be as diverse as possible, they do not engage the responsability of the author; please send comments and corrections here)

1920-1939

1955-1964

Causeries

See also LeSueur & Bory de St Vincent and Gaudichaud-Beaupré (for Freycinet).

Jean Cantacuzène (Ion Cantacuzino) (Bucuresti, Romania, 1863 - 1934?), Roumanian microbiologist, who i.a. worked with toxins of actinians. Another namesake is Alexandre Cantacuzène, 1???-19??, possibly a son of Jean, stationed in Roscoff. He achived his PhD in 1930 on the thesis "Contribution à l'étude des tumeurs bactériennes chez les Algues Marines" and is honoured in the following species: [Synaptiphilus cantacuzenei Bocquet & Stock, 1957, Thaumastoderma cantacuzeni Lévi, 1958, Rhaptapagis cantacuzeni Bouillon & Deroux, 1967].

Maurice Burton, 1898-1989, British spongiologist (curator of the Porifera collection) at the British Museum (Nat. Hist.) from 1925 until his retirement in 1959, most well-known for his monograph on calcareous sponges. Burton was a prolific author, who published ca. 50 papers on the systematics and classification of sponges. [Antho burtoni Lévi, 1956, Burtonanchora De Laubenfels, 1936, Burtonella De Laubenfels, 1928, Burtonispongia De Laubenfels, 1936, Burtonulla Borojevic & Boury-Esnault, 1987, Chondrocladia burtoni Tendal, 1973, Clathria burtoni , Cliona burtoni Topsent, 1932, Erylus burtoni Lévi & Lévi, 1983, Oxeostilon burtoni De Laubenfels, 1934, Proteleia burtoni Koltun, 1964, Rhabderemia burtoni Van Soest & Hooper, 1993, Rhizaxinella burtoni Koltun, 1966]. (Dr. Rob van Soest kindly provided part of this information).

Professor

Kristine Elisabeth Heuch Bonnevie, (8 Oct.) 1872-1949 (30 Aug.), Norwegian marine zoologist, born in Trondheim. Entered the Univ. of Christiania (Oslo) in 1892. Her Zoology professor was Johan Hjort (q.v.) and she published her first article together with him in 1895. Between 1896-99 she i.a. worked on material from Norwegian marine expeditions. In 1900 she was appointed conservator of the Zoological Museum, Oslo, and this year she went to study with Arnold Lang (q.v.) in Zürich, then to Würzburg, Germany, where she studied with Theodor Boveri (q.v.) and achieved her PhD in 1906 on a dissertation on sex cells in Enteroxenos oestergreni Bonnevie. After a session at Columbia University, she returned to Norway and was made professor of Zoology at Christiania (Oslo) University in 1912 - the first female professor in Norway and had a few years earlier been the first female opponent on a PhD dissertation, that of H. Broch. From this period on, she mainly worked on other fields than marine biology, e.g. cytology and genetics. During WWII she helped the Norwegian underground movement [Bonneviella Broch, 1909, Plumularia bonnevieae Billard, 1907, Cephalobrachia bonnevii Massy, 1917].

[1947 Paul Weiss publishes his concept of 'molecular ecology,' which involves the functional role of the cell surface and 'fields' of chemical and physical conditions: "Let the number of [molecules] keep on increasing..., and all of a sudden a critical stage arises at which some of the [molecules] find themselves...cut off completely from contact with their former vital environment by an outer layer of their fellows....  Thus would ensue a train of sequelae of ever-mounting, self-ordering complexity....  The fate of a given unit would be determined by its response to the specific conditions..., [which vary] locally as functions of the total configuration of the system--its 'field pattern,' for short" (Weiss 1967:819-820). ]

1947 Edwin Colbert discovers a massive quarry of Coelophysis dinosaurs in New Mexico and concludes from their skeletons that these Triassic dinosaurs were swift runners with a bird-like posture

Georges Canetti (Rustchuk, Bulgaria, 1911-1971)

1948 T Sørensen A method of establishing groups of equal amplitude in plant ...

1948 William Howard Stein and Stanford Moore isolated amino acids by passing a solution through through a chromatographic column filled with potato starch.

1948 Claude Shannon in A Mathematical Theory of Communication, establishes a model of communications based on propagation of strings of symbols through a noisy channel. He defines the fundamental problem of communication as the task of reproducing at one point in space a message created at another point.  He works out how such a message can be reliably sent, the theoretical limit of the amount of information it can contain, and contributes the notion of negentropy as a measure of information, thereby creating 'information theory.' The word 'bit,' short for binary digit, and credited to John Tukey, was used in print for the first time. 

1948 Wiener, in Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, which dealt with general communications problems, said that living organisms are metastable Maxwell demons whose "stable state is to be dead" (Weiner 1948:72).  Wiener coined 'cybernetics,' in honor of Maxwell's paper "On Governors," from the Greek for 'steersman,' from which the word 'governor' is descended.

1948 Leloir and his colleagues discover the role of uridine nucleotides in carbohydrate metabolism.

1948 Karl von Frisch studies communication in honeybees.

1948 Peter MacCallum and his colleagues describe the disease among six patients in Australia with a detailed description of a new mycobacterial infection in man. The causative organism was subsequently named Mycobacterium ulcerans. 

1948 Walter Rudolf Hess perfects a method of implanting electrodes in the brains of rats and was able to localize centers of the brain associated with certain instincts.

1948 Benjamin Minge Duggar discovers aureomicin, the first tetracycline antibiotic.

Chantrenne

1948 Melvin Calvin and Benson report that the major intermediate compound in which carbon is fixed in photosynthesis is phosphoglyceric acid.

1948 Malécot publishes Les mathématiques de l'hérédité, in which he poses new bases of population genetics.

1949-1950 Malécot, fifteen years before Weiss and Kimura,poses the bases of the discrete population models and the general idea of spatial variation in population genetics, including models of the spatial distribution of covariances, thus being one of the four founding fathers of population genetics (with Fisher, Haldane and Wright).

1948-1950 Eugene Patrick Kennedy and Albert Lester Lehninger (Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1917 - 1986) discover that the citric acid cycle, fatty acid oxidation, and oxidative phosphorylation take place in mitochondria.

1948 Mary Shorb’s Lactobacillus lactis assay is employed at Merck & Co. to guide purification and crystallization of vitamin B12 from Streptomyces griseus culture. B12 is applied to the treatment of pernicious anemia in man, and as the animal protein factor, the promotion of growth in farm animals. Shorb, M. S. 1948. Activity of vitamin B12 for the growth of Lactobacillus lactis. Science 107: 397.

1949 Microbiologist John Franklin Enders, virologist Thomas H. Weller and physician Frederick Chapman Robbins together develop a technique to grow polio virus in test tube cultures of human tissues. This approach gave virologists a practical tool for the isolation and study of viruses. . e Enders, J. F., T. H. Weller, and F. C. Chapman. 1949. Cultivation of the Lansing strain of poliomyelitis virus in cultures of various human embryonic tissues. Science 109: 85-87.

1949 Christian René De Duve discovers the lysosome.

1949 Erwin Chargaff - A Columbia University chemist who, in , discovered a pattern in the amounts of the four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine (A=T, and G=C). This discovery later became known as Chargaff?s Rule and was instrumental to Watson and Crick?s discovery of the structure of DNA.

Août 1948 Congrès de la paix à Wroclav. Forte délégation d'intellectuels et d'artistes communistes français. L'écrivain soviétique Fadeiev: " Si les chacals apprenaient à taper à la machine, si les hyènes savaient se servir d'un stylo, il est certain que leurs oeuvres feraient penser à celles de Miller, Eliot, Malraux et autres Sartre." Août 1948 La chasse aux sorcières débute aux Etats-Unis.

Une autre victime fut le généticien-mathématicien Georges Teissier, communiste et directeur du CNRS de 1946 à 1950. Le flirt prolongé de Teissier avec le lyssenkisme fut très probablement à l’origine de sa destitution par le Ministère de l’éducation, bien que sur des motifs inventés de toutes pièces. Du début à la fin, Teissier dirigea la recherche génétique conformément aux idées mendéliennes classiques et, finalement, désavoua Lyssenko.

En 1947, Aragon a choisi de réorienter la production de la Bibliothèque française vers des textes idéologiquement et esthétiquement plus proches des attentes du Parti communiste. En 1946, la maison d'édition publiait une quinzaine de titres. Un an plus tard, sa production a doublé. Qualitativement, cette production est marquée désormais par des auteurs soviétiques, des romanciers communistes réalistes, et des manuels techniques. Plus rien ne la distingue des autres maisons d'édition du P.C.F. comme le montre la parution en 1948 de L'Internationale des traîtres de Renaud de Jouvenel. Reste la revue Europe, et son équipe de collaborateurs, à majorité non communiste. Portée par sa tradition de l'engagement, la revue s'aligne de plus en plus sur les mots d'ordre et les combats du P.C.F. Nul doute qu'Aragon mène le mouvement. La parution du numéro " Lyssenko " en octobre 1948 est une des conséquences de la surenchère idéologique et propagandiste qu'Aragon a choisi d'assumer. Depuis septembre 1948, la direction du Parti communiste avait sommé en vain Marcel Prenant de défendre la théorie des deux sciences. De même, La Pensée, revue communiste, publiée par une de ses maisons d'édition, les Éditions sociales, avait fait la sourde oreille aux appels de la direction 24. Restait Europe. Pressée par le temps, la direction du Parti demande à Aragon de se charger de cette vision. C'est ainsi qu'une revue littéraire publia in extenso les minutes de la session de l'Académie des sciences agronomiques d'U.R.S.S., présentant la théorie de Lyssenko. L'entrée dans la guerre froide a également pour effet de pousser le Parti communiste à regrouper ses maisons d'édition, nées sous l'occupation et à la Libération. Si la production théorique du communisme français et international est à la charge depuis 1945 des Éditions sociales, la littérature de fiction et d'essais est produite par trois structures : les éditions France d'abord, les éditions Hier et Aujourd'hui et la Bibliothèque française. Le Parti choisit de donner un rôle centralisateur aux éditions Hier et Aujourd'hui, dirigées alors par Marcelle Hilsum, qui absorbent les deux autres maisons d'édition. En mars 1949, la Bibliothèque française disparaît 25, et Europe est désormais publiée par les Éditeurs français réunis (E.F.R.), résultat de la fusion de ces trois établissements. Néanmoins, la revue demeure d'abord et avant tout la revue d'Aragon, devenu directeur littéraire des E.F.R. De fait, Europe est moins soumise aux desiderata de la direction du Parti qu'aux interprétations qu'en fait Aragon.

1949 Victor Negus and Arthur Keith reconstructed the supralaryngeal airways of a Neanderthal fossil and conclude that its tongue was closer to that of a chimpanzee than a human and that it lacked a pharynx, or soft palate.

1949 William Howard Stein and Stanford Moore report the complete amino-acid analysis of beta-lactoglobulin, determined by starch column partition chromatography.

1949 John Franklin Enders and Frederick Chapman Robbins and Thomas Huckle Weller find that animal viruses could be grown in cell culture instead of live animals.

1949 Ulf Svante von Euler studies the role of norepinephrine as a sympathetic neurotransmitter.

1949 Ivanov-Smolensky publishes his Essays on the patho-psychology of the higher nervous activity according to I.P.Pavlov and his school (original in Russian) which summarises the major conclusions of the Pavlov school.

1949 Pauling shows that sickle cell hemoglobin showed different electrophoretic properties than normal hemoglobin. This demonstrates that genetic mutations lead to specific chemical changes in protein molecules

1949 Hans Selye developed the concept of the stress syndrome after a twelve year study of the physiological effects of stress on animals.

1949-1950 Frederick Sanger developed the 2,4-dinitrofluorobenzine method and Edman developed the phenylisothiocyanate procedure for identification of the N-terminal residues of peptides. Frederick Sanger made the claim that proteins are uniquely specified, the implication being that, as there is no general law for their assembly, a code was necessary.

1949, Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen's Factors of Evolution: The Theory of Stabilizing Selection was translated into English by Dobzhansky and so associated with the 'modern synthesis.'  He offered two versions of stabilizing selection.  The first, which the modern synthesis adopted, built up "the mean or average form by selecting against the extremes at both ends of the distribution" (Gottlieb 1992:133).  The second saw evolution as a process where, in the course of severe environmental pruning and breeding among the survivors, the traits which enabled survival, the 'adaptibilities,' might be assimilated genetically.  This is similar to the Baldwin effect and Waddington's 'genetic assimilation.'

In 1949, Sven Furberg ,in his dissertation for Birbeck College, London,drew a model of DNA, setting sugar at right angles to base, with the correct three-dimensional configuration of the individual nucleotide.

1949, Szent-Györgyi showed the isolated myofibrils from muscle cells contract upon the addition of ATP.

In 1949, Donald Hebb suggested in Organization of Behavior that selective reinforcement of neural connecions accounts for learning and memory.  Moreover, this reinforcement causes the brain to organize itself into 'cell assemblages,' the building blocks of information.  Since any given neuron would belong to several such assemblages, the activation of one assemblage would activate others, creating larger concepts and more complex behaviors.

In 1949, Jerzy Konorski suggested that memory is the result of functional transformations, or plastic changes, in neurons.

In 1949, George A. Miller and Frederick Frick, writing on the uses of information theory in psychology, noted that "what a person expects to hear is critical to what he does hear" (Miller, quoted in Waldrop 2001:97). 

In 1949, Brillouin proposed an information theoretical refutation of Maxwell.

1949 Ephrussi Unités douées de continuité génétique

1949, Gödel, in "A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy," reported his discovery of solutions for the field equations of General Relativity that described worlds, which he calls 'rotating universes,' in which it is possible to travel into the past "exactly as it is possible in other worlds to travel to distant parts of space" (Gödel 1949:560).  

In 1949, Gilbert Ryle, in Concept of Mind, held that the mind is part of the body's activity, not a separate and theoretically equivalent counterpart to the body, not "a ghost in a machine" (Ryle 1949:15).

1950 Chargaff showed that the tetranucleotide theory was wrong, in other words, that DNA did not consist of a monotonous succession of nucleotides (in a fixed order in sets of four), and that the molecule to molecule "ratio of total purines to total pyrimidines, and also of adenine to thymine and of quanine to cytosine, were not far from 1" (Chargaff 1950:13).  The collapse of the tetranucleotide theory made it highly likely that nucleic acids were also sequentially specific.

In 1950, Cyril Hinshelwood published his derivation of the biological activity of a three-dimensional protein strictly from its one-dimensional sequence (Caldwell and Hinshelwood 1950).

In papers of 1950 and 1951, McClintock, working in the genetics of maize, reported finding control elements, providing the first evidence that genetic regulation might be universal.  She found evidence that some genes move from place to place and often affect nearby genes.  In the mid-1970s, these genes were isolated and named transposons (McClintock 1950; McClintock 1951).

1950, George Ledyard Stebbins wrote Variation and Evolution in Plants.

1950 Willi Hennig, , Grundzüge einer Theorie der phylogenetischen Systematik

1950 Lwoff , Louis Siminovitch, and Niels Kjeldgaard, succeeded in 'inducing' Bacillus megaterium, a lysogenic bacteria, to produce virions, or bacteriophage, by irradiation. This established that viruses have a dormant or noninfective stage, which they called 'prophage,' reproducing along with each cycle, and are thus intimately associated with the genetic material of their hosts (Lwoff et al. 1950; Lwoff 1992). Lwoff speculated that animal-cell viruses function in the same way. [revised 02/01/03]

In 1950, Karl von Frisch discerned the code which is conveyed by the dance of bees (Frisch 1951; Frisch 1965).

In 1950, Ernst L. Wynder and Evarts A. Graham published, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a survey indicating a strong correlation between contracting lung cancer and smoking tobacco.

1950, John Forbes Nash, in "Non-cooperative Games," introduced "the concept of the non-cooperative game and develope[d] methods for the mathematical analysis of such games" (Nash, quoted in Kuhn et al 1995:5).  Generalizing the minimax solution introduced by von Neumann in 1928 for the two-person zero-sum game, Nash proved that "every non-cooperative game has at least one equilibrium point..., such that no player can improve his payoff by changing his mixed stategy unilaterally" (Ibid.:5).  In other words, the basic requirement for constituting an equilibrium is the stabilization of the frequencies with which the various stategies are played.  

In 1950, David Huffman devised an algorithm by which any set of symbols can be compressed in everything from compact discs to interplanetary spacecraft (Waldrop 2001:94n).

1950-1955 John Robinson distinquished between gracile and robust Australopithecus in functional terms, which he suggested are somewhat analogous to the differences between chimpanzees and gorillas, and suggested that the gracile type was ancestral to hominids.

1950 H. G. Callan and S. G. Tomlin describes the structure of the nuclear membrane as a double membrane with pores.

1950 Tobjörn Oskar Caspersson and Brachet study the role of RNA in protein synthesis.

1950 Pauling and R. B. Corey proposed the alpha-helix structure for alpha-keratin.

1950 M. Simpson and Choh Hao Li point out that hormonal coordination is necessary for the balanced development of tissue.

1950 Konrad Lorenz establishes the discipline of ethology.

1950-1953 Erwin Chargaff and coworkers discover base equivalencies in DNA: the amount of purines always equals the amount of pyrimidines, the amount of adenine always equals the amount of thymine and the amount of guanine always equals the amount of cytosine.

Piotr Slonimski and Boris Ephrussi

1951 Edward B. Lewis introduced the notion of pseudoallelism.

1951 Carl Djerassi, following the methods of  Russel E. Marker, synthesized 19-Norsteroids, a powerful synthetic progesterone.

En 1951, le généticien français Maxime Lamotte. échantillonne deux formes génétiques de l’escargot des haies

1951 John Rock, Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min Chuch Chang discover that 19-Norsteroids prevents ovulation in women.

1951 Albert Lester Lehninger showed that electron transport from NADH to oxygen is the immediate energy source for oxidative phosphorylation.

1951 Feodor Lynen postulated the role of coenzyme A in fatty acid oxidation.

1951 The laboratories of Feodor Lynen, David Ezra Green, and Ochoa isolate the enzymes of fatty acid oxidation.

In 1951, Pauling discovered by crystallography that an alpha helix, a twisted polypeptide chain, is the basic structure of many proteins.  Successive turns of the helix are linked by hydrogen bonds (Pauling et al. 1951).

In 1951, Lederberg and Norton Zinder announced that in order to become lysogenic bacteria need not wait for a mutation to arise if they can pick up a gene for resistence from another strain, a phenomena they called 'transduction' (Zinder and J. Lederberg 1952). In the same year, Esther Lederberg proved that lysogeny could be transmitted in bacterial crosses like any other genes (E. Lederberg 1951).

Later in 1951, Monod, Germaine Cohen-Bazire, and Melvin Cohn, with an array of artificial b-galactosides, learned to decouple the production of the enzyme from its natural stimulus and from the natural substrate, lactose, and called the process 'induced enzyme synthesis,' or just 'induction.'  Subsequent work established that enzyme induction consists in the actual synthesis from amino-acids of the entire enzyme molecule, and that this protein is stable, not 'dynamic,' as many thought(Monod et al. 1951).

In 1951, Carl Djerassi synthesized 19-nor-17a-ethynyltesterone, or norethindrone, an inhibitor of ovulation when taken orally.

Harriet Ephrussi Taylor: transformation allogène du pneumocoque Exp Cell Res 2 589-607

In 1951, Erwin Mueller invented the field-ionization microscope.

In 1951, Jay Forrester and Robert Everett, working for the United States Navy, completed the construction of ' Whirlwind,' a 'real-time computer,' taking twice the space of ENIAC, which could constantly monitor its inputs, making it suitable for simulations.  In the course of its development, Forrester devised 'magnetic-core memory.'  Whirlwind's success caused the U. S. Air Force to fund Project Lincoln, which used Whirlwind as the test bed for the air defense system.  This system required analog-digital tele-communication and its engineers built a device called a modulator-demodulator, or 'modem.' 

In 1951, Willard Van Orman Quine, in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," said the distinction between 'analytic' and 'synthetic,' roughly that between ideas and fact, and 'reductionism,' which holds that logical constructs are meaningful if they refer to immediate experience, are each ill-founded dogmas.  The real "unit of empirical significance is the whole of science" (Quine 1953:42).

1952 Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley, using microelectrodes applied to the gigantic axon of a squid, demonstrated the ionic workings of nerve impulses and described them in a series of mathematical formulas (Hodgkin and Huxley 1952).

In 1952, Alexander  R. Stokes worked out the mathematics of helical diffraction, important in interpreting X-ray crystallographs.

In 1952, Lederbergs and Luca Cavelli-Sforza and William Hayes, working independently, announced that bacteria differentiated into genetic donors and recipients.  Hayes said further that when the doner passed a copy of its genes to the recipient, it could also pass the genetic ability to be a donor (J. Lederberg et al. 1952; Hayes 1952).

In 1952, Alexander L Dounce said that the order of amino-acids in each specific protein derives from the order of nucleotides in the corresponding RNA molecules which were templated by the DNA molecules (Dounce 1952).

1952 Guido Pontocorvo assembled evidence that the gene as the minimum unit of heritable physiological function had considerable length along the chromosome.  The gene as the minimum unit in which mutations can be induced is much smaller.  Therefore, mutations could occur at different points along a single physiological gene (Pontecorvo 1952).

1952 Hershey and Martha Chase suggest that only DNA is needed for viral replication. proved, on the basis of their bacteriophage research, that DNA alone carries genetic information. They use radioactive isotopes 35S to track protein and 32P to track DNA and show that progeny T2 bacteriophage isolated from lysed bacterial cells have the labeled nucleic acid. Further, most of the labeled protein doesn’t enter the cells but remains attached to the bacterial cell membrane. Hershey, A. D. and M. Chase. 1952. Independent functions of viral protein and nucleic acid in growth of bacteriophage. J. Gen. Physiol. 36: 39-56. In Microbiology: A Centenary Perspective, edited by Wolfgang K. Joklik, ASM Press. 1999, p. 474 [PDF]Hershey and Martha Chase showed that when a phage particle infects its bacterial host cell, only the DNA from the phage enters the cell and the protein of the phage remains outside.  Combining Chargaff's result with that of the Hershey-Chase experiment meant that the repeating elements of Schrödinger's codescript could be identified as the nucleotides carrying adenine, quanine, thymine, or cytosine (Hershey and Chase 1952).

1952 Turing had noticed that patterns are formed by the rates at which interacting chemicals diffuse and react.  This "theory can, in principle, account for the specification of most (possibly of all) biological patterns, although the mathematical obstacles are often formidable" (Harold 1990:415).  The mathematics involves "the [non-linear] bifurcation properties of the solutions of differential equations.  Applied mathematicians had been aware for many years that when a parameter of a system passes through a certain critical value there can be a qualitative change in behavior as a previously stable state becomes unstable.  The archetypal example, first studied by Euler more than two centuries earlier, is the sudden buckling of a beam when it is overloaded" (Saunders 1992:xiv).  This theory accounts for certain organizational features in plants (e.g., the frequency of five petals and the scarcity of seven petals), but it is also compatible with physiological genetics (Turing 1952).

1952 Joshua Lederberg and Esther Lederberg publish their replica plating method and provide firm evidence that mutations in bacteria yielding resistance to antibiotics and viruses are not induced by the presence of selective agents. Replica plating or transfer of specific physical isolates allows for rapid screening of large numbers of genetic markers. Lederberg, J. and E. Lederberg. 1952, Replica plating and indirect selection of bacterial mutants. J. Bact. 63: 399-406.

In 1952, Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies theorized that schizophrenia was the result of a chemical chain reaction, the cycle of which could only be broken by a retreat from 'reality.'  Osmond later coined the term 'psychodelic.'

In 1952, Jay Haley and G. Bateson recognized that the symptoms of schizophrenia are suggestive of an inability to discriminate logical types and described it in terms of a double-bind hypothesis (Bateson 1954).

In 1952, Urey, in The Planets: Their Origin and Development, argued that the cold, original atmosphere of the Earth must have been composed of the stable molecules of methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen.

In 1952, Michael George Francis Ventris deciphered so-called 'Linear B,' an extremely archaic form of Greek>, probably written by the South Achaeans in the late second millenium bce.  

  In 1953, G. Mueller reported finding amino-acids in a carbonaceous chondrite, a meteorite, but his finding was discounted because of the possibility of contamination. 

1953 Sanger, using dinitrophenol which binds to one end of an amino-acid, determined the sequence of the glycyl chain of the amino-acid bases in bovine insulin, the first protein to be so analyzed (Sanger and Thompson 1953). The other chain was sequenced by 1955 and revealed that there was a sequence unique to bovine insulin, that it was not a repetitive series, and, in hind site, confirmed that a code would be required for protein synthesis.

1953 George E. Palade, Keith Roberts Porter, and Albert Claude developed methods of fixation and thin sectioning that enabled many intracellular structures, which they named 'endoplasmic reticulum,' to be seen in electron microscopes (Porter 1953).[added 02/01/03]

In 1953, Lwoff postulated that the protein coats on viruses are carcinogenic when activated by outside factors such as ultraviolet light (Lwoff 1953; Judson 1978:375).

1953 1940, Urey became director of the United States government program to separate uranium isotopes.  In the course of this, he developed statistical methods of isotope separation which permitted large scale production of uranium 235.

In 1953, James Dewey Watson and Francis Harry Compton Crick built a model of DNA showing that the structure was two paired, complementary strands, helical and anti-parallel, associated by secondary, noncovalent bonds.  This discovery made apparent the mechanism of replication.   Their effort brought together the functional and the structural approaches to the study of life: Watson's background was with the phage group and Crick was a physicist learning X-ray crystallography (Watson and Crick 1953).  The two approaches combined to become, as Crick called it in 1947, "the chemical physics of biology" (quoted in Judson 1979:110) and, finally, molecular biology. Maurice H. F. Wilkins' and Rosalind Franklin's X-ray crystallographs of DNA supported the discovery of the structure (Wilkens et al. 1953; Franklin and Gosling 1953).

[In 1953, in working out the structure of the double helix, Watson and Crick had "for the first time introduced genetic reasoning into structural determination by demanding that the evidently highly regular structure of DNA must be able to accomodate the informational element" (Stent 1980:xvii).  In other words, "the basis of heredity switched from one based on location to one based on information encoded in the structure of macromolecules" (Sapp 1987:193).  Watson and Crick employed 'information,' the recently popularized cybernetic term, differently than cyberneticists: Genetic information is functional whereas cybernetic information is defined as the mathematical converse of entropy].

1953 COLD SPRING HARBOR SYMPOSIA ON QUANTITATIVE BIOLOGY 18():101-121
JACOB F; WOLLMAN EL
INDUCTION OF PHAGE DEVELOPMENT IN LYSOGENIC BACTERIA

In 1953, Szilard and Aaron Novick proposed that a cell's synthesis of some enzymes was not stimulated by the presence of an inducer, but by the absence of the enzyme's end product, a classic example of feedback control (Novick and Szilard 1954).

1953, Gamow 1904-1968 began the attempts to explain the coding problem, that is, how the sequential structure of DNA could directly, physically order the sequential structure of proteins.  In Gamow's scheme, several different base sequences could code for one amino-acid (Gamow 1954). n truth, the notion of a "code" as the key to information transfer was not articulated publicly until late 1954, when Gamow, Martynas Ycas, and Alexander Rich

In 1953, Konrad Emil Bloch and, independently, Feodor Lynen discovered the mechanics and regulation of cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism: Acetic acid, or acetyl coenzyme A, is converted to mevalonic acid, which is converted to isoprene, a hydrocarbon, which converts into a symmetrical C30 hydrocarbon, squalene. This is converted into lanosterol, and finally into cholesterol (Bloch and Langdon 1957). [revised 02/01/03]

In 1953, G. C. Willis noticed that atherosclerotic plaques keep forming in the same places on the ground substance of the arterial intima and, subsequently, did studies which implicated mechanical stresses, such as high blood pressure and heart beats.  That the lesions of scurvy occur in the intimal ground led to Willis's hypothesis that ascorbic acid is a treatment for atherosclerosis (Willis 1953:17-22).

In 1953, Stanley L. Miller, in Urey's lab, bombarded a mixture of ammonia, water vapor, hydrogen, and methane with an electrical discharge to simulate lightening and produced the amino-acids alanine and glycine (S. Miller 1953:528-529). "Not since Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea in 1828 had a chemical experiment been hailed as a comparable milestone" (de Duvé 1991:109-110).  Since that time, a number of experiments have been performed in which these molecules are converted to greater complexity by ultraviolet light and ionizing radiation.

In 1953, Medawar, Leslie Brent, and Rupert E. Billingham established in principle that immunological tolerance could be acquired by injecting hemopoietic cells from a genetically different donor into rodents in utero or at birth.  Not having evolved the immunolgical equipment to reject them, the engrafted cells perpetuated themselves, and endowed the recipient with the donor immune system (Billingham et al. 1953).

In 1953 and 1954, Vincent du Vigneaud synthesized the peptide hormones oxytocin and vasopressin.

In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman noticed regularly occurring periods of rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep and correlated this with when dreams are particularly vivid and emotionally charged.  This opened a new era of research in the relation of brain to mind.

In 1953, An Wang invented the magnetic core computer memory.

In 1953, Wittgenstein published his Philosophical Investigations in which he held, among other things, that the mind categorizes on the basis of 'family resemblances:' "How is the concept of a game bounded?  What still counts as a game and what no longer does?...  We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn" (Wittgenstein 1953:I, 68-69).    

In 1954, Marthe Vogt recognized that noradrenaline was present in the hypothalmus.

In 1954, Rita Levi-Montalcini and associates showed that nerve growth factor stimulated the growth of axons in tissue culture.

In 1954, Paul Zamecnik, working with rat liver, developed and refined the cell-free system, a biochemical cocktail, for protein synthesis.  The basic constituents are molecules of RNA containing amino-acids, enzymes, ATP, and microsomal particles, or ribozymes.

In 1954, Benzer, working with mutant rII viruses in bacteria, proved that mutations occurred within genes and devised a technique by which one could locate mutations at the scale of a single nucleotide.  This enabled him to sequence, or map, the parts of the gene, the amino-acids, that is to say, the 200,000 letters of the phage virus genetic code (Benzer 1955).

In 1954, Hugh E. Huxley and Jean Hanson and, independently, A. Huxley and R. Niedergerke observed in X-ray crystallographs that, when muscles contract, the areas built exclusively of actin filaments are comparatively narrow.  To explain this, they hypothesized that bridges occur between the actin, or thin, filaments and the thick, or myosin, filaments and that these bridges pull thin filaments past the thick filaments in a racheting action.  It is known as the 'sliding filament, moving cross-bridge model.'

In 1954, Anthony C. Allison provided evidence that individuals heterozygous for the sickle-cell gene are protected against malaria.

1954 Jean Dausset observed that some recipients of blood transfusions formed antibodies.  These antibodies defined the first 'human leukocyte antigens' (HLA) and led to the definition of the 'major histocompatibility complex' (MHC). H-2, an antigen similar to HLA, had been discovered earlier by Snell. HLA can be typed and thus blood tests can determine the compatibility of transplant tissue. MHC is a genetically controlled system by which the body distinquishes material it deems harmful. [revised 02/01/03]

In 1954, Salk developed an injectable killed-virus vaccine against poliomyelytis, the incidence of which began to decline after mass immunization began the following year. [revised 02/01/03]

In 1954, Andrei N. Kolmogorov outlined a theorem, subsequently proved by Vladimir Igorevich Arnold and Jürgen Kurt Moser, and known as KAM theory, which dealt with the influence of Poincaré resonances on trajectories, showed their frequencies to depend on the values of dynamic variables, and provided the starting point for understanding the appearance of chaos in Hamiltonian systems.

In 1954, Charles Hard Townes , J. P. Gordon, and H. J. Zieger, in "Molecular microwave oscillator and new hyperfine structures in the microwave spectrum of NH3," developed the theory of the maser, or 'microwave amplification by stimulated evision of radiation.'  The maser is an oscillator  in which the basic frequency control arises from atomic resonance rather than a resonant electric circuit.  The waves are coherent; that is, they're all the same frequency, in the same direction, and the same phase relationship. The following year, Nikolai Gennediyevitch Basov, independently, also developed a maser.

Gamow

In 1954, at the time of his death, von Neumann was writing Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, where he proved, in theory, that a 'cellular automaton' could reproduce itself provided it exceeds a certain threshold of complexity.  This formalism was suggested to him by Ulam: Each cell in a lattice would be occupied by an automaton in one of a finite number of states.  At each tick of a cosmic clock, the automaton would change to a new state, determined by its current state and the states of its neighbors.  Automata theory is known as recursion theory among logicians.  The book, edited by Burks, was published in 1966.

In 1954, Needham published the seven volumes of Science and Civilization in China.    

1954 Bernard Katz describes impulse transmission across a synapse.

1954 Hugh Esmore Huxley, Jean Hanson R. Niedergerde, and Andrew Fielding Huxley formulated the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction.

1954 Daniel I. Arnon and colleagues discovers photosynthetic phosphorylation.

1954 Britton Chance and G. R. Williams applied the oxygen electrode and difference spectrophotometry to the study of the dynamics of electron transport in mitochondria.

1954 Revised estimates put the age of the earth at five to six billion years.

1954 J. C. Dan describes the acrosome reaction in sperm.

1954-1958 E. P. Kennedy describes the pathway of biosynthesis of triacylglycerols and phosphoglycerides and the role of cytidine nucleotides.

André Lwoff

Piaget

Medical mycologist Chester Emmons confirms what many had suspected, that Histoplasma capsulatum resides in soil, by culturing the organism from rat burrows. Emmons, C. W. 1949. Isolation of Histoplasma capsulatum from soil. U. S. Pub. Hlth. Rep. 64: 892-896.

1950 Robert Hungate publishes a description of the roll-tube culture technique, which permits culturing anaerobes. The procedure eliminates oxygen by underlaying with it with carbon dioxide and then introducing agar. This is a key advance in studying anaerobic bacteria from cow rumen.. Hungate, R. E. 1950. The anaerobic mesophilic cellulolytic bacteria. Bact. Rev. 14: 1-49.
Andre Lwoff and Louis Siminovitch demonstrate that irradiation with ultra-violet light terminates the lysogenic state in bacteria and permits bacteriophage to replicate and then lyse the host cell. This opens the field of lysogeny to molecular analysis. With Jacob and Monod, Lwoff is awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in

A. Lwoff, L. Siminovitch, and N. Kjeldgaard. 1950. Comptes Rendus. 231:190-91. In Microbiology: A Centenary Perspective, edited by Wolfgang K. Joklik, ASM Press. 1999, p.470 [PDF]
Joshua Lederberg uses the term plasmid to describe extranuclear genetic elements that replicate autonomously.
Lederberg, J. 1952. Cell genetics and hereditary symbiosis. Physiol. Rev. 32: 403-430.
Joshua Lederberg and Norton Zinder report on transduction, or transfer of genetic information by viruses. They show that a phage of Salmonella typhimurium can carry DNA from one bacterium to another. Zinder, N and J. Lederberg, 1952. Genetic exchange in Salmonella. J. Bact. 64: 679-699.
Renato Dulbecco shows that single particles of an animal virus can produce plaques. With Baltimore and Temin, Dulbecco is awarded the Nobel Prize in Mediicne and Physiology in 1975 1975 Nobel Prize
Dulbecco, R. 1952. Production of plaques in monolayer tissue cultures by single particles of an animal virus. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 38: 747-752. In Microbiology: A Centenary Perspective, edited by Wolfgang K. Joklik, ASM Press. 1999, p.494 [PDF]Coming of Age of Animal Virology, ASM News 65, 1999. p.334
Marvin Bryant isolates spirochetes from cattle rumen. Bryant, M. 1952. The isolation and characteristics of a spirochete from the bovine rumen. J. Bacteriol. 64: 325-335.
1952 Salvador Luria and Mary Human, and independently Jean Weigle, describe a non-genetic heritable variation in bacteriophage imposed on the host in which it was grown. They call this phenomenon host-controlled modification and note that the incorrectly modified phage are "restricted" in the inappropriate host. This later leads to study of bacterial systems of restriction and modification, and eventually the discovery of restriction endonucleases. Luria, S.E. and M. Human. . A nonhereditary, host-induced variation of bacterial viruses. J. Bact. 64: 557-569.

William Hayes proposes that bacterial conjugation involves the unidirectional transfer of genes from a donor to a recipient cell. Until then, most microbiologists believed that there was either a fusion of cells or an exchange of genetic information. Contemporaneous with Cavalli, Lederberg, and Lederberg, he also shows that a fertility factor, F, a non-chromosomal plasmid, is present only in donor cells. Lederberg, J., L.L. Cavalli, and E. M. Lederberg. 1952. Sex compatibility in Escherichia coli. Genetics 37: 720-730.
Hayes, W. 1952. Recombination in Bact.coli. K-12: unidirectional transfer of genetic material. Nature 169: 118-119. James T. Park and Jack L. Strominger conclude that penicillin acts by inhibiting murein synthesis in the cell wall. This is the first discovery of the mode of action of a natural antibiotic.
Park, J. T. 1952. J. Biol. Chem. 194: 877, 885, 897.

1953 Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, together with James Watson, describe the double-helix structure of DNA. The chemical structure is based on x-ray crystallography of DNA done by Rosalind Franklin. Crick, Wilkins and Watson are awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1962 Watson, J. D. and F. H. C. Crick, 1953. Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for desoxyribonucleic acid. Nature 171: 737-738.

Jonas Salk begins preliminary testing of polio vaccine. The vaccine is composed of three types of killed virus. Salk, J. E. 1953. Studies in human subjects on active immunization against poliomyelitis. A preliminary report of experiments in progress. JAMA. 151: 1081.

Elizabeth Lee Hazen and Rachel Fuller Brown develop the first useful fungal antibiotic, NYSTATIN. The drug is developed through a long-distance collaboration with Brown in Albany and Hazen in New York City. Hazen, E. L., R. F. Brown, and A. Mason. 1953. Protective action of Fungicidin (Nystatin) in mice against virulence enhancing activity of oxytetracycline on Candida albicans. Antibiotics & Chemother. 3: 1125.

1952 Norton David Zinder and Joshua Lederberg discovers transduction: bacterial DNA can be carried from one bacterium to another by a bacteriophage virus.

Maxime Lamotte

1952 W. Beerman associated chromosomal puffs with gene activation.

1952 Brachet suggested that movements of microsomes (which contain ribonucleic acid) from the archenteron roof to the overlying ectoderm are involved in neural induction.

1952 Robert William Briggs and T. J. King demonstrates an apparent developmental differentiation in nuclear genotypes.

1952 Gustav Kramer demonstrates sun-compass orientation in birds.

1952-1953 George Emil Palade, Keith Roberts Porter, and Fritiof Stig Sjöstrand perfected thin sectioning and fixation methods for electron microscopy of intracellular structures, especially of mitochondria.

1952-1953 Rosalind Franklin (-) produces precise X-ray diffraction images of the B form of DNA.

Chantrenne, Brachet 1952-54 Paul Charles Zamecnik and his colleagues discover that ribonucleoprotein particles, later named ribosomes, are the site of protein synthesis.

1953 Palade describes ribosomes.

Chantrenne

Spirin

Engelhardt

Georges Gamow

1953 Frederick Sanger, E. O. P. Thompson and Hans Tuppy completed the determination of the amino-acid sequence of the A and B chains of insulin.

1953 Bernard Leonard Horecker, Dickens, and Efraim Racker elucidate the 6-phosphogluconate pathway of glucose catabolism.

1953 André Michel Lwoff finds that bacteriophage viruses were capable of inserting their genome into the host genome. A virus in this condition is known as a prophage.

1953 Harold Clayton Urey and Stanley Lloyd Miller finds that several amino-acids were formed when ammonia, methane, water vapor and hydrogen were exposed to an electrical discharge for several days. This suggested a possible scenario for the origin of life on the primitive earth.

1953-1954 Vincent du Vigneaud carried out the first laboratory synthesis of the peptide hormones oxytocin and vasopressin.

Some significant dates 1955-1964

1920-1939

1955-1964

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