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The year 1986 in science and technology involved many significant events, some listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• January 24 - Voyager 2 space probe makes first encounter with Uranus.
• January 28 - Space Shuttle Challenger explodes on launch, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
• February 19 - The Soviet Union launches the Mir space station.
• March 8 - Japanese spacecraft Suisei flies by Halley's Comet, studying its UV hydrogen corona and solar wind.

Biology

• May: First reported methods for constructing a monoclonal antibody containing parts from mouse and human antibodies, a required first step toward the development of humanized antibodies used later as medical therapeutics (such as Infliximab).

Computer science

• April 3 - IBM unveils the PC Convertible, the first laptop computer.
• Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) was visualized.

Medicine

• Food and Drug Administration approval of the first monoclonal antibody drug, Muronomab-CD3 (also known as Orthoclone OKT3), for treatment of transplant rejection.

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Simon Donaldson, Gerd Faltings and Michael Freedman
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Ernst Ruska, Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer
  • Chemistry - Dudley R. Herschbach, Yuan T. Lee, John C. Polanyi
  • Medicine - Stanley Cohen, Rita Levi-Montalcini
• Turing Award - John Hopcroft, Robert Tarjan
• Wollaston Medal for Geology - Claude Jean Allègre

Births

Deaths

• January 28 - Crew of Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-51-L:
  • Francis R. Scobee (b. 1939)
  • Michael J. Smith (b. 1945)
  • Judith Resnik (b. 1949)
  • Ellison Onizuka (b. 1946)
  • Ronald McNair (b. 1950)
  • Greg Jarvis (b. 1944)
  • Christa McAuliffe (b. 1948)
• Zhang Yuzhe (b. 1902), Chinese astronomer.

References

1. Jones P.T.; Dear P.H.; Foote J.; Neuberger M.S.; and Winter G. (1986). Replacing the complementarity-determining regions in a human antibody with those from a mouse. Nature 321(6069), 522-525. PMID 3713831.
2. Waldman, Thomas A. (2003). Immunotherapy: past, present and future. Nature Medicine 9, 269-277.