1997 in science

The year 1997 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

* January 17 – Explosion of a Delta II rocket carrying a military GPS payload shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral.
* February 13 – Tune-up and repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope is started by astronauts from the Space Shuttle Discovery.
* July 4 – Mars Pathfinder lands on the surface of Mars
* August 25 – Launch of Explorer 71 of the Explorer program of spacecraft
* October 30 – First successful test flight of the ESA's Ariane 5 expendable launch system

Aviation

* September 7 – First test flight of the F-22 Raptor

Biology

* February 22 – In Roslin, Scotland, scientists announce that an adult sheep named Dolly had been successfully cloned and was born in July 1996
* March 4 – United States President Bill Clinton bars federal funding for any research on human cloning
* April 25 – Scientists announce that Human artificial chromosomes have been created.
* July 10 – In London, scientists report their DNA analysis findings from a Neandertal skeleton which support the out of Africa theory of human evolution placing an "African Eve" at 100,000 to 200,000 years ago
* November 19 – In Des Moines, Iowa, Bobbi McCaughey gives birth to septuplets in the second known case where all seven babies were born alive, and the first in which all survived infancy.

Computer science

* May 11 – IBM's Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, the first time a computer defeated a chess grand master in a match. Deep Blue had defeated Kasparov before, but had never won a match against him.

Geology

* May 10 – An earthquake near Ardekul in northeastern Iran kills at least 2,400

Medicine

* Food and Drug Administration approval of daclizumab, the first humanized antibody therapeutic. [cite journal | last = Waldman | first = Thomas A. | date = 2003 | url = http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nm/journal/v9/n3/full/nm0303-269.html&filetype=pdf | format = PDF | title = Immunotherapy: past, present and future | journal = Nature Medicine | volume = 9 | pages = 269–277 | doi = 10.1038/nm0303-269 ]

Technology

* October 15 – The first supersonic land speed record is set by the ThrustSSC team from the United Kingdom

Awards

* Nobel Prizes
** Physics – Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, William D. Phillips
** Chemistry – Paul D. Boyer, John E. Walker, Jens Christian Skou
** Medicine – Stanley B. Prusiner
* Turing Award – Douglas Engelbart
* Wollaston Medal for Geology – Douglas James Shearman

Births

Deaths

* January 17 – Clyde Tombaugh (b. 1906), astronomer, discoveror of Pluto
* April 7 – Georgi Shonin (b. 1935), cosmonaut.
* March 9 – Christopher George Latore Wallace (b. 1972), rapper
* May 2 – John Carew Eccles (b. 1903), psychologist
* August 24 – Louis Essen (b. 1908), physicist, co-developer of the first practical atomic clock
* September 4 – Hans Eysenck (b. 1916), psychologist

References