The year 1972 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• January 5 – President of the United States Richard Nixon orders the development of a Space Shuttle program.
• February 4 – Mariner 9 sends pictures from Mars.
• February 21 – The Soviet uncrewed spacecraft Luna 20 lands on the Moon.
• March 2 – Launch of Pioneer 10 spacecraft.
• April 16 – Apollo 16 launched.
• June 30 – The International Time Bureau adds the first leap second to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
• July 23 – The United States launches Landsat 1, the first Earth-resources satellite.
• December 7 – Apollo 17 launched with three astronauts and five mice, and The Blue Marble photograph of the Earth is taken.
• December 11 – NASA astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt land on the Moon and begin a three-day exploration.

Biology

• February – S. J. Singer and Garth L. Nicolson describe the fluid mosaic model of the functional cell membrane.^[1]
• September – Geoffrey Burnstock proposes the existence of a non-adrenergic, non-cholinergic (NANC) neurotransmitter, which he identifies as adenosine triphosphate (ATP), originating the term 'purinergic signalling'.^[2]
• October 1 – The first publication reporting the production of a recombinant DNA molecule, by Paul Berg and colleagues, marks the birth of modern molecular biology methodology.^[3]
• Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould publish their landmark paper on punctuated equilibrium.^[4]
• Socorro doves (Zenaida graysoni) last seen in the wild. The species precariously survives in captivity. A reintroduction program is being prepared.

Computer science

• April 6 – Cray Research founded.^[5]
• May – Magnavox release the first home video game console which can be connected to a television set – the Magnavox Odyssey, invented by Ralph H. Baer.^[6]
• July 12 – First C compiler released.^[7]
• October – The First International Conference on Computer Communications is held in Washington, D.C., and hosts the first public demonstration of ARPAnet, a precursor of the Internet.
• November 29 – Atari release the production version of Pong, one of the first video games, devised by Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn.
• Karen Spärck Jones introduces the concept of inverse document frequency (idf) weighting in information retrieval.^[8]
• Write-only memory is devised as a joke in Signetics.^[9]

Earth sciences

• February 8 – First Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) defined at the Silurian-Devonian boundary at Klonk in the Czech Republic.^[10]

Ecology

• January – A Blueprint for Survival first published as a special edition of The Ecologist magazine in the United Kingdom.^[11]
• James Lovelock first refers to the Gaia hypothesis in print.^[12]
• The Climatic Research Unit is founded by climatologist Hubert Lamb at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

Mathematics

• Daniel Quillen formulates higher algebraic K-theory.
• Daniel Gorenstein announces a 16-step program for completing the classification of finite simple groups.^[13]
• Richard M. Karp shows that the Hamiltonian cycle problem is NP-complete.

Medicine

• January 31 – Immunosuppressive effect of ciclosporin discovered by a team at Sandoz, Basel, under Hartmann F. Stähelin.
• Harvey J. Alter identifies the presence of hepatitis C virus.
• Tu Youyou and collaborators obtain a pure extract of the antiplasmodial drug artemisinin.
• Archie Cochrane publishes Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services in the U.K.
• John Yudkin publishes Pure, White and Deadly in the U.K., warning of the dangers of sucrose in diet.
• The last major epidemic of smallpox in Europe breaks out in Yugoslavia.

Metrology

• 00:00:00 UTC matches 00:00:10 TAI exactly and the tick rate of UTC is changed to match TAI exactly.^[14]

Paleontology

• Kielan-Jawarowska and Rinchen Barsbold report the associated remains of a Velociraptor and Protoceratops apparently killed and preserved while fighting.

Psychology

• Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky begin to publish together on cognitive bias and heuristics in judgment and decision-making.

Technology

• February 1 – The first scientific hand-held calculator (labeled Hewlett-Packard, later designated the HP-35) is introduced, at a price of $395.00.
• July 10 – Jack Cover files U.S. patent 3,803,463 for the original form of Taser electroshock weapon.
• English inventor Peter Powell develops a steerable dual-line kite.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, John Robert Schrieffer
  • Chemistry – Christian B. Anfinsen, Stanford Moore, William H. Stein
  • Medicine – Gerald Edelman, Rodney R Porter
• Turing Award – Edsger Dijkstra

Births

• March 31 – Evan Williams, American Internet entrepreneur.
• April 5 – Nima Arkani-Hamed, Canadian-American theoretical physicist.
• June 21 – Warren Lyford DeLano, American bioinformatician and open source advocate (d. 2009).
• unknown date – Kathy Vivas, Venezuelan astrophysicist^[15]

Deaths

• February 20 – Maria Goeppert Mayer (b. 1906), German-American theoretical physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• May 4 – Edward Calvin Kendall (b. 1886), American chemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• May 8 – Beatrice Helen Worsley (b. 1921), Canadian computer scientist.
• August 11 – Max Theiler (b. 1899), South African-born American virologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• August 22 – Ștefan Procopiu (b. 18990), Romanian physicist.
• August 25 – Lucien Bull (b. 1876), Irish-born French pioneer in chronophotography.
• October 1 – Louis Leakey (b. 1903), British paleoanthropologist.
• November 25 – Henri Coandă (b. 1886), Romanian aeronautical engineer.