April 25

Bruno Meissner, whose two-volume survey of Babylonian and Assyrian civilization and the Reallexikon der Assyriologie shaped the field, was born in 1868.

Subbaraya, later Swami Krishnananda, prolific Vedanta scholar and long-serving general secretary of the Divine Life Society, was born in Puttur, Karnataka.

James Henry Breasted, the American Egyptologist and historian, became the first archaeologist elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Isaline Blew Horner, the English Pali scholar and long-serving president of the Pali Text Society, died a few weeks after her eighty-fifth birthday.

Swami Ranganathananda, the thirteenth president of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission and a widely heard expositor of Vedanta, died in Kolkata at age 96.

Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor and a pioneer of long-distance radio transmission, was born in Bologna in 1874.

The journal Nature published the one-page paper by James Watson and Francis Crick proposing the double-helix structure of DNA; the date is now marked each year as DNA Day.