Milton Wexler Dies

Milton Wexler, a prominent Hollywood psychoanalyst whose efforts to find a cure for the disease that killed his wife led scientists to pinpoint the Huntington's gene, has died. He was 98.

Wexler died of respiratory failure March 16 at his home, his daughters said.

Though trained in law and psychology, Wexler spent much of the past three decades 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, got the Huntington's diagnosis. That meant the couple's daughters, Alice and Nancy, had a 50 percent risk of also inheriting the disease.

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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 1978, 10 years after her diagnosis.

Rest In Peace, Milton.