1997 in science

The year 1997 in science and technology had many significant events, including those listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• 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/A-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
• 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 Carlisle, Iowa, Bobbi McCaughey gives birth to septuplets in the second known case where all seven babies were born alive

Computer science

• May 11 – IBM's Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, the first time a computer beat a chess grand master

Geology

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

Medicine

• FDA approval of daclizumab, the first humanized antibody therapeutic.^[1]

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.
• 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.
• Armin Kutzsche (b. 1914), medical researcher.

References

1. ⇧ Reference: Waldman, Thomas A. (2003). Immunotherapy: past, present and future. Nature Medicine 9, 269–277.