1945 - Science

Science

Gloucestershire-born biochemist Frederick Sanger, 27, at Cambridge pioneers the genetic sequencing of amino acids with his discovery that the compound dinitrophenol (DNP) will bond to one end of an amino acid, creating a bond even stronger than when two amino acids bond with each other (see Avery, 1944; Watson, Crick, 1953; insulin sequencing, 1955).

Britain's 283-year-old Royal Society decides to elect women fellows; crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale becomes the first (see 1929). A confirmed pacifist, she served a month in prison during the war for refusing to pay a fine imposed on women who did not register for civil defense or other national service in 1939.

Mineralogist and biogeochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky dies at Leningrad January 6 at age 81, having urged the Soviet government to develop an atomic energy industry; Nobel chemist Hans Fischer commits suicide at Munich March 31 at age 63 after a bomb destroys his laboratory; physicist Hans Geiger of Geiger counter fame dies at Potsdam September 24 at age 62; Nobel chemist-physicist Francis W. Aston at Cambridge, England, November 20 at age 68, having discovered many different isotopes with his mass spectograph; biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan dies at Pasadena, Calif., December 4 at age 79.