Nancy Wexler (born 19 July 1945)[1] FRCP MEASA is an American geneticist and the Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, best known for her involvement in the discovery of the location of the gene that causes Huntington's disease.

The daughter of a Huntington's patient, she led a research team into a remote part of Venezuela where the disease is prevalent.

She obtained samples of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) from a large family with a majority of the members having Huntington's disease.

The samples her team collected were instrumental in allowing a global collaborative research group to locate the gene that causes the disease.

Wexler participated in the successful effort to create a chromosomal test to identify carriers of Huntington's disease.

Nancy Wexler was born 19 July 1945, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Pacific Palisades, California and Topeka, Kansas.

Both parents taught the girls different areas of science, including the environment, nature, physics, and astronomy.

"[5] In 1968 her father started the Hereditary Disease Foundation, which introduced her to scientists such as geneticists and molecular biologists.

[2][6] Her sister, Alice Wexler is three years older, and has her PhD in History and also contributed to the field of Huntington's.

Starting in 1979, the team conducted a twenty-year-long study in which they collected over 4,000 blood samples and documented 18,000 different individuals to work out a common pedigree.

[9] For her work, she has been awarded the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science (2007), and honorary doctorates from New York Medical College, the University of Michigan, Bard College and Yale University.

To keep her from hurting herself at night, her bed was padded with lamb’s wool.” She continued to lose weight; she needed to consume at least 5,000 calories a day because of her unique metabolism.

Wexler continued her research of the HD disease and accredits her ambition and motivation to her father, Milton Wexler; he and her sister Alice worked closely with her for years until her father turned his work over to her and her colleagues, feeling that science had become too complicated for him.

[3][11] Wexler has held many public policy positions, including: Chair of the Joint NIH/DOE Ethical, Legal and Social Issues Working Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute; Chair of HUGO, the Human Genome Organization; and member of the Institute of Medicine.

She has served on the American Association for the Advancement of Science board of directors, and the advisory committee on Research on Women's Health, NIH.

She was hosting a workshop and listened as key theorists explained their visions of gene hunting and was struck with the idea.

Nancy Wexler served as a director of a program that provided presymptomatic and prenatal testing for Huntington's disease.

[23] “When my sister and I both decided not to have children,” she says, “neither of us ever expected anything to happen in our lifetime that might change that.”[23] Wexler did not stop outside research projects although battling with her own testing.

Wexler states that, “The genetic test gives people a crystal ball to see the future: will the city be free of bombs from now on or will a bomb crash into their home, killing them and jeopardizing their children?”[22] On December 6, 2007, Prestwick Pharmaceuticals presented information to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding tetrabenazine.