Nancy Wexler

Nancy Wexler FRCP is an American geneticist at the Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology at Columbia University, best known for her involvement in the discovery of the location of the gene that causes Huntingtons disease. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology but instead chose to work in the field of genetics. The daughter of a Huntingtons patient, she led a research team into a remote part of Venezuela where the disease is prevalent. The samples her team collected were instrumental in allowing a global collaborative research group to locate the gene that causes the disease. Wexler participated in the successful effort to create a chromosomal test to identify carriers of Huntingtons Disease.

Nancy Wexler was born July 19, 1945, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Topeka, Kansas. Wexler is a geneticist and the Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology at Columbia University, best known for her discovery of the location of the gene that causes Huntingtons disease . Despite having an A.B. and PhD in clinical psychology, Wexler instead chose to work in genetics. She is the daughter, granddaughter, and niece of Huntingtons disease sufferers, and was part of a team in Venezuela who located the gene that causes it and created a chromosomal test to identify carriers. Her sister, Alice Wexler is three years older, and has her PhD in History and also contributed to the field of Huntingtons. Nancy Wexler and the rest of the Wexler family feature prominently in Alices book, Mapping Fate A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research that describes how the Wexlers coped with an affected mother while simultaneously trying to spearhead HD research. Alice Wexler is now working on a new book o

Source: Wikipedia