Word: wexler
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...Wexler credits her father, now 83 and still a practicing psychoanalyst in Los Angeles, with motivating her on the day that he told her about her mother's illness and discussed the fact that she was at risk as well. "Practically in the same breath," she recalls, "he said, 'And we're going to fight it.' " He informed Nancy and her sister that he had started a group dedicated to curing Huntington's and had begun organizing workshops at which scientists could plan their attack on the still mysterious cause of the disease. "It was really therapeutic," Nancy says...
Enrolling in graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Wexler set her sights on a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, and chose Huntington's disease as her thesis subject. She also set up a Huntington's group in nearby Detroit, working with afflicted families there...
After earning her doctorate in 1974, Wexler set out to look for work, armed with glowing recommendations from her thesis advisers, who by this time had learned of her risk. "I had to ask them to rewrite their letters, to tone them down," she confesses. "While they didn't say I was at risk, they portrayed me as being totally committed to Huntington's research. I was worried that a potential employer might become suspicious that I was at risk and be afraid to hire...
...Wexler did find work: first as a psychology teacher at New York City's New School for Social Research, eventually as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. Getting that job, says Wexler, "was very healing to me. They knew I was at risk, and they were familiar with Huntington's symptoms. They knew I would become a civil service employee and they would have a hard time getting me out of there if I got sick. Yet they hired me. Finally everything was out in the open...
...this time genetic researchers were devising ingenious ways to isolate and identify disease genes in human DNA, and Wexler recalled a Huntington's meeting she attended in 1972. There a doctor reported the discovery of a group of interrelated Huntington's families, numbering in the thousands, who live along the shores of Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo. "At the time," says Nancy, "we all thought that this extended family was a fantastic resource for genetic research, but nobody knew how to formulate the right research." Wexler decided it was time...