Word: rabbiters
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Instead of the classic "They're off!" and the clanging bell quickly obliterated by the sound of pounding hooves you hear "Theeeere goes SWIFty!!" and a mechanical rabbit by that name on the end of a pole whirs in front of the hounds, who pant frantically after it. The majority of races are sprints, and even the long races are over before you have time to tear your eyes away from Swifty. Most bettors stay custered around the TV's in the grandstand and shriek and hoot for "2" or "8" or "5". Almost no-one calls the hounds...
Caught up in their own indefatigable chase, the moneychangers in the temple seem far removed from the greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit around the far side of the track...
Died. Gregory Goodwin Pincus, 64, research director of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology and a brain father of birth control pills; of myeloid metaplasia, a blood disease; in Boston. A brilliant biologist, Pincus first won national attention in 1939 by inducing a "fatherless" mammalian birth (a lab-fertilized rabbit egg); then in the 1950s, with Harvard Gynecologist John Rock, successfully tested an ovulation depressant called progestin, which came on the market in 1960 as Enovid. At his death, Pincus was testing yet another idea: a "morning after" pill, which keeps fertilized eggs from settling in the womb...
...lone bird flying at midday in search of a rabbit...
Chasing the mechanical rabbit around the far side of the track, the greyhounds seem far removed from the frantic pursuit in the grandstand. Their motives are uncomplicated, instinctual, products of an evolutionary trail springing in ancient Egypt and exploited by their upbringing on one of the 200 or so kennels in this country...