Milton Wexler (August 24, 1908 – March 16, 2007) was a Los Angeles psychoanalyst who was responsible for the creation of the Hereditary Disease Foundation.
[3] It is curious that the textbook she consulted stated that only men suffered from this disease given that the original description by George Huntington in 1872 described it in a mother and daughter.
His patients included the director Blake Edwards, the actors Jennifer Jones and Dudley Moore, the comedian Carol Burnett and the architect Frank Gehry.
With the help of his daughters Wexler enlisted a number of scientists including the Nobel laureate James Watson.
Salaries were low (US$1,000 per annum plus expenses), but he managed to attract workers by organizing parties with Hollywood stars, including many of his patients.
In 1972 Wexler became aware of a village on the edge of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela with an extremely high incidence of Huntington's disease.
He became aware of this village when a Venezuelan physician and biochemist at the University of Zulia, Americo Negrette, showed a film at a medical conference about this community, where the condition was known as 'El mal'.
In 1979, Wexler's daughter Nancy set up a research project there to study its transmission and to collect DNA from those with the disease and from those who had escaped it.
The origin of the disease was eventually traced back to a single woman, María Concepción, who had lived in this area about 200 years before and whose roughly 18,000 descendants were primarily located in two villages in Venezuela, Barranquitas and Lagunetas.
The gene itself was finally located in 1993[7] The consortium involved in its discovery included fifty eight scientists in six groups spanning the Atlantic.