Nancy Wexler

Nancy Wexler

Nancy Sabin Wexler (born June 19, 1945 in Washington, DC ) is an American psychologist, known for her contributions to the research and treatment of the hereditary disease Huntington's disease .

family

She is the daughter of the psychoanalyst (with a practice in Los Angeles) and psychologist Milton Wexler (1908–2007) and the biologist Leonore Sabin (1913–1978). Her mother's family had several members of the hereditary disease Huntington's Disease (HD ), including her maternal grandfather and mother, who developed symptoms in 1968.

education

Wexler studied English and Social Sciences at Radcliffe College with a degree in 1967, was at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in 1967/68 and in 1968 on a Fulbright scholarship at the Hampstead Clinic Child Psychoanalytic Training Institute in London. From 1968 she studied psychology at the University of Michigan , where she received her doctorate in clinical psychology in 1974. Her dissertation was on the psychological effects of a positive diagnosis on HD.

specialization

After the HD cases in his wife's family in 1973, her father founded a society for the promotion of research into hereditary diseases (Hereditary Disease Foundation), in which Nancy Wexler and her sister Alice also worked from the beginning. As a result, Nancy Wexler came into contact with many scientists and received further training, for example in genetics . She herself had only attended the basic biology course at university.

After funds for research into the disease had been approved by the US Congress in the mid-1970s, she became chair of the Commission for the Study of HD (as administrator at the National Institute of Neurology of the National Institutes of Health from 1978 to 1983) and traveled with colleagues Venezuela, where HD cases are particularly high in villages on Lake Maracaibo . From 1981 they took blood samples from those affected and in 1983 they were able to identify the anomalous, repetitive DNA sequence responsible for the hereditary disease, after which a test could be developed that was available from 1986. The gene was located at the top of chromosome 4 in 1993 . Since there is no basic therapy and the disease is almost always fatal, Wexler attached great importance to intensive psychological support during the tests from the start.

Wexler took over the helm of the Hereditary Disease Foundation from her father in 1983. She became Assistant Professor of Psychology at the New School of Social Research in New York in 1974 and had a private practice. She has been Professor of Neuropsychology at Columbia University since 1992 (later Higgins Professor ).

Her sister Alice Wexler, a historian, published a book in 1996 about her family's HD cases and research into the causes of the disease.

Awards

In 2007 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Biology, in 1993 the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award and in 1987 she received the Pasarow Award . In 1990 she received the Venezuelan President's Prize. She is an honorary doctor from New York Medical College, the University of Michigan, Bard College, and Yale University. She held many honorary positions, for example she was head of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) and its committee for ethics, legal and social issues. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ( 2005 ) and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and on their council. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and an Honorary Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Fonts

• with JF Gusella u. a: A Polymorphic DNA Marker Genetically Linked to Huntington's Disease , Nature, Volume 306, 1983, pp. 234-238
• The Huntington's Disease Collaborative Research Group: A Novel Gene Containing a Trinucleotide Repeat That is Expanded and Unstable on Huntington's Disease Chromosomes , Cell, Vol. 72, 1993, pp. 971-983
• with Judith Lorimer, Julie Porter, Fidela Gomez, Carol Moskowitz, Edith Shackell, Karen Marder, Graciela Penchaszadeh, Simone A. Roberts, Javier Gayan, Denise Brocklebank, Stacey S. Cherny, Lon R. Cardon et al .: Venezuelan kindreds reveal that genetic and environmental factors modulate Huntington's disease age of onset , Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., Vol. 101, 2004, pp. 3498-3503
• with JM Andresen u. a .: The relationship between CAG repeat length and age of onset differs for Huntington's disease patients with juvenile onset or adult onset , Ann. of Hum. Gen. Vol. 71, 2006, pp. 295-301
• with J. Gayán a. a .: Genomewide linkage scan reveals novel loci modifying age of onset of Huntington's disease in the Venezuelan HD kindreds , Genet. Epidemiol., Vol. 32, 2008, pp. 445-453

Web links

• Homepage
• Reto U. Schneider, Knowledge is powerless, Die Zeit, October 12, 2000 (to Nancy Wexler)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Birth dates in American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
2. ↑ Probably brought in by a European sailor at the beginning of the 19th century, who passed it on to his daughter, of whom around 16,000 people could be identified as descendants and carriers of the hereditary disease
3. ↑ The marker was found by James Gusella (Massachusetts General Hospital) after Wexler initiated the search for the marker: Gusella, JF; Wexler, NS; Conneally, PM; Naylor, SL; Anderson, MA; Tanzi, RE; Watkins, PC; Ottina, K .; Wallace, MR; Sakaguchi, AY; Young, AB; Shoulson, I .; Bonilla, E .; Martin, JB, A polymorphic DNA marker genetically linked to Huntington's disease, Nature, Volume 306, 1983, pp. 234-238. The normal gene codes for a protein with a chain of no more than 34 glutamine building blocks, the defective one for 37 or more glutamine building blocks.
4. ↑ In the Zeit-Portrait from 2000 (see web links) she was critical of the testing for the genetic defect after the experiences she had gathered in the meantime, especially since in practice there was often insufficient or even no psychological care.
5. ↑ Alice Wexler: Mapping Fate - A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research , University of California Press 1996