Word: willards
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...often must rely on the costly services of attendants to help them with simple everyday chores. Now a young researcher at Tufts-New England Medical Center thinks she has found a cheaper, possibly better way: just as guide dogs serve as eyes for the blind, says Psychologist Mary Joan Willard, 28, so small trained monkeys can act as hands, arms and legs for the handicapped...
...Willard conceived her novel idea while doing postdoctoral work under famed Behaviorist B.F. Skinner, who has managed such unlikely feats of animal training as teaching pigeons to play Ping Pong. Encouraged by Skinner, Willard decided to turn to primates as aides for the paralyzed because of the animals' grasping ability. She settled on capuchin monkeys. Only 1% ft. high, they have long been used by organ-grinders, are highly intelligent, far more malleable than larger monkeys, and can live up to 30 years...
With a $1,000 grant from the Tufts rehabilitation department, Willard purchased two laboratory-bred capuchins named Crystel and Tish, at a cost of $350 each. Willard spent nearly a year training them with Skinner's trial-and-reward techniques and finally felt ready to turn them over to two handicapped people. One was a Mystic, Conn., woman who worked with Tish for three months before the experiment was halted. The other was William Powell, 31, who has been paralyzed from the shoulders down, except for partial use of his right arm (though not his hand), since a motorcycle...
Enter the familiar multiethnic crew, some with new assignments: Chief Engineer Scott, Helmsman Sulu, Communications Officer Uhura, Security Chief Chekov, Doctor Chapel and Transporter Chief Janice Rand. They will be joined by the Enterprise's new captain, Willard Decker (Stephen Collins), who is naturally annoyed at being bumped to No. 2, and Navigator Ilia (Persis Khambatta), the bald beauty from the planet Delta...
...DIED. Willard Mullin, 76, illustrious sports cartoonist whose incisive, comic pen-and-ink drawings appeared in the New York World-Telegram and such magazines as LIFE and the Saturday Evening Post for more than three decades, and who created the Brooklyn Bum, a grizzled, cigar-chomping caricature of the Brooklyn Dodger baseball fan; of cancer; in Corpus Christi, Texas...