Leader of Huntington's cure search dies

Milton Wexler, a prominent Hollywood psychoanalyst whose efforts to find a cure for the disease that killed his wife led other scientists to pinpoint the Huntington's gene, has died. He was 98.

Wexler died of respiratory failure March 16 at his home, his daughters said.

Though trained in law and psychology, Wexler spent much of the last three decades unlocking the mysteries of Huntington's disease, a rare, incurable genetic disorder that slowly killed his wife, her father and three brothers.

Wexler launched what is now known as the Hereditary Disease Foundation in 1968, when his wife, Leonore Wexler, got the Huntington's diagnosis. That meant the couple's daughters, Alice and Nancy, had a 50 per cent risk of inheriting the disease.

Huntington's diseasecauses nerve cells in the brain to waste away, leading to symptoms such as uncontrolled movements, emotional disturbances and difficulty recalling recent events or making decisions.

In the early 1970s, Wexler began to recruit young scientists to help find a cure. The freewheeling workshops inspired by his therapeutic sessions with artists stressed brainstorming and were innovative in biomedical research.

In 1983, scientists nurtured by Wexler and later also by Nancy, a clinical psychologist found the genetic marker for Huntington's. In 1993, they located the gene itself.

"The search for the Huntington's gene became the paradigm for all such gene hunts," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the government-supported National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. "That all came out of that wonderful intellectual ferment that Milton and Nancy created."

Collins was part of Wexler's workshops in the mid-1980s, when he was a junior professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Hollywood fame

Wexler was born in San Francisco in 1908 and grew up in New York City, where he trained as a lawyer before becoming a psychoanalyst in the 1930s.

In 1946, he joined the staff of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan., where his success treating schizophrenics gained attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1951.

Wexler found success treating clients who were well-known in Hollywood, even sharing a screenplay credit with director Blake Edwards, the husband of actress Julie Andrews, for the movies The Man Who Loved Women and That's Life!

Wexler also accepted donations for his foundation from such patients as Jennifer Jones, Carol Burnett and architect Frank Gehry.

About one in every 10,000 Canadians has Huntington's disease, and about five in 10,000 are at risk of developing it, according to the Huntington Society of Canada.