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Gregory Goodwin Pincus was born on April 9th 1903 in Woodbine, New Jersey. The son of Joseph and Elizabeth. His father was a teacher, an agricultural consultant and editor of the paper the Jewish Farmer.
The family moved to the Bronx in New York, Gregory attended Morris High School here.
He studied well at school, choosing to further his education at Cornell University, from which he graduated in 1924; he then began a three-year postgraduate study at Harvard. Whilst in his first year here he met and married Elizabeth Notkin, a social worker who boarded with his family. 1927 saw the beginning of anther three years of study, this time divided between the e Universities of Cambridge and Berlin.
By 1930 he had become a member of the biology faculty at Harvard, a position he was to hold for eight years.
In 1938 he entered Clark University in the experimental zoology department.
By 1944 he had established himself as director of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. His work here was to become most significant, as it was work in reproductive physiology.
Gregory had been persuaded by Margaret Sanger, a leading figure in the American birth-control movement to look into the possibilities of an oral contraceptive pill. A challenge, which Gregory immediately accepted.
In 1951 he received a grant from the Planned Parenthood Association and began work in earnest.
He and his partner experimented with over two hundred substances. This had been made possible, partly due to the fact that synthetic hormones had become available in the 1950`s.
Gregory started field tests in pill form with hundreds of women in Massachusetts, Puerto Rico and Haiti in 1956. The tests proved to be effective. In 1957 the FDA authorized them. The contraceptive pill had been born.
In 1960 he received the first of many awards for his work, among then the Laker Award, the Oliver Bird Award and the Modern Medicine Award. In 1964 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Soon after the success of the contraceptive pill Gregory and his partner began working on a new pill, which would prevent implantation after fertilization, the work was never finished.
On August 22nd 1967 in Boston, MA. Gregory Pincus passed away.
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