Milton Wexler, one of Hollywood’s most prominent psychoanalysts and the founder of a research organisation whose scientists discovered the gene that causes Huntington’s disease, has died. He was 98.
Wexler died of respiratory failure on March 16 at his home in Santa Monica, his daughters said.
Though a therapist to such stars as comedian Carol Burnett and architect Frank Gehry, Wexler poured much of his energy over the past three decades into unlocking the mysteries of Huntington’s disease, a rare, incurable genetic disorder that slowly killed his wife, her father and three brothers.
Wexler launched what is now known as the Hereditary Disease Foundation in 1968, when his wife, Leonore Wexler, was diagnosed, giving the couple’s two daughters, Alice and Nancy, a 50% risk of inheriting it.
In the early 1970s, he began to recruit young scientists to workshops aimed at finding a cure. The freewheeling workshops, inspired by his therapeutic sessions with artists, stressed brainstorming and were innovative to biomedical research.
In 1983, the scientists nurtured by Wexler — and later also by Nancy, a clinical psychologist — found the genetic marker for Huntington’s. In 1993, they located the gene itself.
Dr Anne B Young, a Harvard Medical School professor and chief of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, called Wexler a ”visionary”.
”Today we have the gene. We have an inkling of what the gene does. It wouldn’t have happened without Milton,” Young told the Los Angeles Times.
Born in San Francisco in 1908, Wexler grew up in New York City where he trained as a lawyer before becoming a psychoanalyst in the 1930s.
In 1946, he joined the staff of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, where his success treating schizophrenics gained attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1951.
Wexler found success treating clients who were well-known in Hollywood, even sharing a screenplay credit with director Blake Edwards, the husband of actress Julie Andrews, for the movies The Man Who Loved Women and That’s Life!.
Wexler also accepted donations for his foundation from such patients as Jennifer Jones, Burnett and Gehry. ”He was brilliant at the moment of truth,” Gehry said.
More recently, Wexler appeared in Sidney Pollock’s documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, and was described in a Los Angeles Times review as, ”a winning, charismatic presence”.
On the Hereditary Disease Foundation’s website, where Alice and Nancy announced their father’s death, the women call Wexler ”a force of nature whose visionary presence changed hundreds of thousands of lives for the better”.
The research into Huntington’s has become a family affair.
Nancy Wexler, a professor at Columbia University, succeeded her father as foundation president. Alice, a historian, wrote Mapping Fate, a 1995 memoir of her family’s struggles. They are Wexler’s only survivors, after choosing not to have children when they learned they may have inherited their mother’s defective gene.
Leonore Wexler died on Mother’s Day in 1978, 10 years after her diagnosis. — Sapa-AP