March 24, 2007

Milton Wexler, 98; helped find gene for Huntington's disease

by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES -- Devastating health news to his ex-wife almost 40 years ago sent Milton Wexler, a lay psychoanalyst popular with actors and artists, on a journey to the edge of a scientific frontier. He would emerge a hero.

Mr. Wexler, 98, who died of respiratory failure last Friday at his Santa Monica, Calif., home, ignored the scientific wisdom of the time and poured his energy into unlocking the mysteries of Huntington's disease, a rare, incurable genetic disorder often described as a time bomb because the mental and physical havoc it wreaks typically does not surface until midlife.

In the early 1970s, after starting what is now the Hereditary Disease Foundation, he began to recruit young scientists willing to gamble on a long shot for workshops aimed at finding a cure.

The workshops -- structured like the group therapy sessions Mr. Wexler ran in his Los Angeles practice -- stressed brainstorming and were unlike anything the scientists had experienced.

In 1983, after a decade of struggle in laboratories around the country, the scientists trained by Mr. Wexler -- and later by his daughter Nancy, a clinical psychologist -- achieved the breakthrough few people believed possible: They found the genetic marker for Huntington's. In 1993, they located the gene .

These milestones in the genetics revolution did not help Leonore Wexler, Mr. Wexler's former wife, who died of Huntington's 10 years after her diagnosis on Mother's Day in 1978. But they would have a profound impact on others.

Discovering the gene not only represented an enormous step toward finding a cure for Huntington's, but it demonstrated the feasibility of mapping the array of 30,000 human genes.

Mr. Wexler "proved it could be done," said Dr. Francis Collins, who was a junior professor at the University of Wisconsin when he joined Mr. Wexler's workshops in the mid-1980s.

Collins helped develop the methods for identifying the genes responsible not only for Huntington's disease but for cystic fibrosis before going on to lead the successful effort to complete the genome blueprint in 2003.

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

Anne B. Young, a Harvard Medical School professor and chief of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, said Mr. Wexler was "a visionary. . . . He was the guru and the glue" who held together a project that many eminent scientists had deemed foolish.

"Today we have the gene. We have an inkling of what the gene does. It wouldn't have happened without Milton," Young said. "He was a catalyst for all of that."

Born in San Francisco but reared in New York City, Mr. Wexler entered Syracuse University at 16 and earned a law degree from New York University.

But he hated practicing law and abandoned it in 1937 to obtain a doctorate in psychology at Columbia University.

He also studied under Theodor Reik, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, who helped legitimize the practice of psychoanalysis by nonphysicians in the United States.

Mr. Wexler followed Reik's path and became one of the country'ts first lay psychoanalysts.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, he joined the staff of the Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric research and treatment center in Topeka, Kan., where his success in treating schizophrenics gained attention.

He gave his patients round-the-clock care, even taking a small group of them on vacation with his family so their treatment would not be interrupted.

"He was an organizing force in their life. A lot of people got better," Nancy Wexler said.

In 1951, he left Menninger and moved to Los Angeles to begin a more lucrative private practice that would enable him to help support his wife's three brothers, who had been diagnosed with Huntington's the year before.

When the Wexler daughters learned that they might have inherited their mother's defective gene, they decided not to have children.

When the test to detect the gene was developed, in part through their efforts, they chose not to take it, believing that the wrong answer could raise more questions than they could handle.

Their father agreed with their decision. They were the reason he got into the fight in the first place.

"I became an activist because I was terribly selfish," he once said. "I was scared to death that one of my daughters would get it, too."

Now in their 60s, they have remained free of the disease.

Click here to read other articles about Milton Wexler