"Huntington's Disease" Nancy Wexler Hand Signed 5X7 B&W Photo for Sale

"Huntington's Disease" Nancy Wexler Hand Signed 5X7 B&W Photo For Sale

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"Huntington's Disease" Nancy Wexler Hand Signed 5X7 B&W Photo:
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Up for sale a RARE! "Huntington's Disease" Nancy Wexler Hand Signed 5X7 B&W Photo.

1945) FRCP 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. She

earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology but instead chose to work in the

field of genetics. The daughter of a Huntington's patient, she led a research

team into a remote part of Venezuela where the disease is prevalent. She

visited the villages of Laguneta, San Luis, and Barranquitas. 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. Wexler's father, Dr. Milton Wexler, was a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist,

and her mother was a geneticist who taught biology before her children were

born. Both parents taught the girls different areas of science, including the

environment, nature, physics, and astronomy. Wexler's grandfather died when her

mother, Leonore, was only 15 years old. Leonore looked up Huntington's disease (HD)

at the library and read that it was “a fatal, inherited disease only affecting

men.” Leonore's three brothers, Seymour, Paul, and Jesse Sabin, all

suffered from HD and died within four years of each other. The diagnosis was

kept a secret from the rest of the family for many years. The uncles were

called "nervous," instead of ill. When Leonore started showing

symptoms of HD, her then ex-husband, Milton, kept the diagnosis from her for

about a year. She still thought that HD only affected men. When they finally

told her she had HD, Nancy said, “Her mother did not protest. It seemed as if

Leonore, knowing her family history, had perhaps understood the truth all

along.” Wexler

thought at an early age she would want to know as much as possible about the

disease. Nancy Wexler attended many workshops including her own. She was most

impressed by the workshop of George Hunting which was a film showing Huntington

disease patients as a part of a community near Lake Maracaibo in comparison to

most U.S patients confined to nursing homes. Years later, Nancy became involved

in the Venezuela research.

From 1963, Wexler studied for her A.B. in psychology at Radcliffe

College, graduating in 1967. She then earned a PhD in clinical psychology from

the University of Michigan in 1974. While studying for her A.B. she was

required to take an introductory biology course, which constitutes "[her]

only formal education in biology. In 1968 her father started the Hereditary Disease

Foundation, which introduced her to scientists such as geneticists

and molecular biologists. Along with textbooks and lectures she attends, the

scientists "have really been [her] teachers since then." Nancy and Alice both became very involved in

the foundation and both became trustees. Nancy is now President of the

foundation. The group raises funds for research on HD and related inherited

diseases. They also sponsor interdisciplinary workshops for scientists who work

on HD and other genetic diseases. In 1976 the U.S. Congress formed the Commission for the Control of

Huntington's Disease, and as part of their work, Wexler and the team travelled

to Barranquitas and Lagunetas, two settlements on Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, where villagers had a particularly

high occurrence 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. The

discovery that the gene was on the tip of chromosome 4 led to the development of a test for the

disease. 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. She is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research

institution. Wexler's mother's symptoms progressed from fingers

moving constantly, to uncontrollable motions. Nancy explains, “When she sat,

her spasmodic body movements would propel her chair along the floor until it

reached a wall, her head would bang repeatedly against the wall. 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. She died on Mother's Day, 1978.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.

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. Her

sister, Alice Wexler is three years older, and has her PhD in History and also

contributed to the field of Huntington's. Nancy Wexler and the rest of the

Wexler family feature prominently in Alice's book, Mapping Fate -A

Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research that describes how

the Wexlers coped with an affected mother while simultaneously trying to

spearhead HD research. Alice Wexler is now working on a new book on the social

history of HD. In taking over the work of her father, Nancy Wexler met with

many issues and difficulties. The goal of Wexler's research was to continue the

work. The studies were done on maternal and fraternal parents with

Huntington's disease. For years the researchers used DNA to study DNA of

Huntington's disease patients. Nancy Wexler first encountered the idea of using

polymorphisms as markers in October 1979. She was hosting a workshop and

listened as key theorists explained their visions of gene hunting and was

struck with the idea. It was from her idea that James F. Gusella focused on finding HD markers. He

quickly hit upon the marker that would determine if a person had HD. Wexler

gave Gusella samples of blood that she had collected from people in Venezuela

and one after another, the samples confirmed the early finding. Huntington's

disease is one of several trinucleotide repeat

disorders which are caused by the length of a repeated section

of a gene exceeding a normal range. The HTT gene is located on the short arm of chromosome 4 at 4p16.3. HTT contains a sequence of

three DNA bases—cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG)—repeated multiple

times (i.e. ... CAGCAGCAG ...), known as a trinucleotide repeat.] CAG is the genetic code for the amino acid glutamine, so a series of them results in the production of a

chain of glutamine known as a polyglutamine tract (or

polyQ tract), and the repeated part of the gene, the PolyQ region.