Word: wexlers
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...Nancy Wexler was 22 when she got the grim news. Arriving home in Los Angeles after studying abroad on a Fulbright scholarship, she learned that her mother, then 53, had been found to have Huntington's disease. Wexler was devastated. The genetic disorder, which afflicts 30,000 Americans, had claimed the lives of her three uncles and her maternal grandfather, and she was only too well aware of what lay ahead for her mother: mental deterioration, uncontrollable movements in all parts of the body and, after a decade or so, death...
Those dismaying revelations had a profound effect on Wexler, becoming the driving force in her remarkable career and largely shaping her personal life. Today, at 46, she is best known for her work -- which involved tracing the family tree of thousands of Venezuelans -- that led to the development of a highly accurate test for the Huntington's gene. She is president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation and chairs a key advisory group of the $3 billion Human Genome Project, which is attempting to identify all of the more than 100,000 human genes and pinpoint their locations...
...Philip Cook, professors of public policy and economics at Duke University, challenge the games of chance as regressive, inefficient means of raising revenue and suggest they prey upon minorities and the poor. The professors also wonder whether the lotteries' get-rich-quick appeal undermines the American work ethic. Arnie Wexler, director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling in New Jersey, another opponent, says almost half the calls for help that come to his organization are from lottery players...
Still, DeVito's developing Napoleon complex is fun to watch, and Haskell Wexler's cinematography -- part semidocumentary, part burnished formalism -- is entrancing. It is a serious defect of our movies, our fictions in , general, that they generally ignore what may be the central, and is surely the most entertaining, drama in American life: high-stakes corporate wrangling. So here's one proxy cast in favor of Other People's Money, whose managers have at least risked opening a new product line in these difficult times...
...Wexler and Newell said they will continue to perform their act in various Harvard dining halls this week in conjunction with the "Ecolympics," an interhouse recycling competition...