1960 in science

Astronomy and space exploration

• August 11 – The return capsule of the U.S. Discoverer 13 Corona mission is successfully recovered from the Pacific Ocean, the first time any man-made object has been recovered successfully from orbit.
• September – A Soviet SS-2 Sibling missile is successfully launched in a suborbital test from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the first Chinese spaceflight.
• October 4 – The U.S. Army Courier 1B, the world's first active communications repeater satellite, is launched into low earth orbit.

  Biology

• February 13
• * Max Perutz publishes the structure of hemoglobin.
• * John Kendrew publishes the structure of myoglobin.
• March 5 – British marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy announces his aquatic ape hypothesis, theorising that swimming and diving for food exerted a strong evolutionary effect partly responsible for the divergence in the common descent of humans and other great apes.
• April – Robin Hill and Fay Bendall publish the 'Z scheme' of electron transport in photosynthesis.
• July – Robert Burns Woodward publishes a total synthesis of chlorophyll.
• July 14 – English primatologist Jane Goodall arrives at what will become Gombe Stream National Park in Tanganyika to begin her groundbreaking behavioral study of chimpanzees in the wild.
• November 4 – At the Kasakela Chimpanzee Community, Jane Goodall observes a chimpanzee using a grass stalk to extract termites from a termite hill, the first recorded case of tool use by animals.
• December 10 – The first underwater park within the United States, the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, is formally dedicated; it covers and protects coral reefs, seagrass and mangroves inside its boundaries.
• Czech biochemist Emil Paleček discovers that nucleic acids can be studied through electrochemistry, contradicting previous assumptions that DNA molecules are too large to have electrochemical properties and allowing them to be used in the diagnosis of genetic disorders.
• Jacques Ruffié invents hemotyping.
• Juan Oro finds that concentrated solutions of ammonium cyanide in water can produce the nucleotide adenine.
• Four independent researchers discover the bacterial RNA polymerase that regulates the polymerization of nucleotides under the control of DNA.
• Climatron geodesic dome greenhouse opens at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

  Computer science

• August – Edsger W. Dijkstra and :nl:Jaap Zonneveld|Jaap A. Zonneveld produce the first implementation of the ALGOL 60 programming language.
• John McCarthy of MIT publishes the Lisp programming language.

  Earth sciences

• May 22 – Valdivia earthquake: Chile's subduction fault ruptures from Talcahuano to the Taitao Peninsula, causing the most powerful earthquake on record and a tsunami.
• Harry Hammond Hess proposes the concept of seafloor spreading.

  Exploration

• January 23 – Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reach bottom in the Mariana Trench in United States Navy bathyscaphe Trieste at a depth of 10,916 m.
• May 10 – The nuclear submarine USS Triton, under the command of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., completes the first underwater circumnavigation of the Earth.

  Mathematics

• Wacław Sierpiński proves the existence of Sierpinski numbers.
• Stanko Bilinski rediscovers the Bilinski dodecahedron.
• In the classification of finite simple groups, Michio Suzuki and Rimhak Ree introduce Suzuki–Ree groups; and John G. Thompson, Walter Feit and Marshall Hall prove that a group with a fixed-point-free automorphism of prime order is nilpotent, and that all finite simple CN groups of odd order are cyclic.
• C. A. R. Hoare invents the quicksort algorithm.
• Irving S. Reed and Gustave Solomon present the Reed–Solomon error correction code.

  Medicine

• April 15 – William C. Chardack implants the first fixed-rate cardiac pacemaker with mercury battery, designed by Wilson Greatbatch.
• May 2 – The first coronary artery bypass surgery is performed by a team led by Dr. Robert Goetz and thoracic surgeon Dr. Michael Rohman with the assistance of Drs. Jordan Haller and Ronald Dee at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Bronx Municipal Hospital Center in the United States using internal mammary artery as the donor vessel; the patient survives for 9 months.
• May 9 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces that it will approve birth control as an additional indication for G. D. Searle's Enovid, making it the world's first approved combined oral contraceptive pill.
• June 6 – The American Heart Association announces a strong statistical association between heavy cigarette smoking and coronary heart disease.
• October 30 – The first kidney transplantation in the United Kingdom is performed by a team led by English surgeon Michael Woodruff at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh between identical twins.

  Meteorology

• April 1 – The United States launches the first weather satellite, TIROS-1.

  Metrology

• October – 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures establishes International System of Units, abbreviated SI from the French name, Le Système international d'unités.

  Paleontology

• November 4 – OH 7, first fragments of Homo habilis, discovered by Jonathan Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.

  Physics

• March 22 – Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes receive the first patent for a laser.
• May 16 – Theodore Maiman demonstrates the first working laser, a ruby laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories.

  Psychology

• Harrison G. Gough and Alfred B. Heilbrun, Jr. introduce the Adjective Check List to assess psychological traits of an individual.

  Technology

• A tungsten halogen lamp bulb is patented by General Electric engineer Fredrick Moby.
• Prototype Pentax Spotmatic single-lens reflex camera, pioneering through-the-lens metering, is presented.

  Awards

• Nobel Prizes
• * Chemistry – Willard Libby
• * Physics – Donald A. Glaser
• * Physiology or Medicine – Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Peter Medawar
• Copley Medal – Harold Jeffreys
• Vetlesen Prize – Maurice Ewing
• Wollaston Medal – Cecil Edgar Tilley

  Births

• March 20
• * Norbert Pohlmann, German computer scientist.
• * Yuri Shargin, Russian cosmonaut.
• May 3 – Jaron Lanier, American computer scientist.
• October 18 – Craig Mello, American biologist.
• December 24 – Carol Vorderman, British mathematician.

  Deaths

• March 27 – Gregorio Marañón, Spanish physician, scientist, historian and philosopher.
• April 24 – Max von Laue, German physicist, winner of the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• May 8 – J. H. C. Whitehead, British mathematician.
• June 17 – Sir Harold Gillies, New Zealand-born plastic surgeon.
• August 10 – Oswald Veblen, American mathematician, geometer and topologist.
• September 22 – Melanie Klein, Austrian-British psychoanalyst.
• December 8 – Ross T. McIntire, American naval surgeon.