Friday, March 23, 2007

Milton Wexler, 98, Spurred War on Huntington's Disease

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Milton Wexler, a prominent Hollywood psychoanalyst whose efforts to find a cure for the disease that killed his wife led scientists to pinpoint the Huntington's gene, died March 16. He was 98.

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 percent risk of also inheriting the disease.

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, the scientists nurtured by Wexler 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.

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!"

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