Nancy Wexler

Who is Nancy Wexler?

Nancy Wexler FRCP 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 Huntington's disease. Despite having an AB and PhD in clinical psychology, Wexler instead chose to work in genetics. Herself the daughter of a Huntington's sufferer, she led a research team into a remote part of Venezuela where the disease is prevalent. The samples that team collected were the key data 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 Huntington's Disease.

Her older sister, Alice Wexler, also contributed to the field of Huntington's. Nancy and the rest of the Wexler family feature prominently in Alice's book, Mapping Fate – a memoir that describes how the Wexlers coped with a diseased mother while simultaneously trying to spearhead Huntington's disease research..