Milton Wexler | Huntington's pioneer, 98

Milton Wexler, 98, 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, died of respiratory failure March 16 at his Santa Monica, Calif., home.

Although trained in law and psychology, Dr. Wexler spent much of the last three decades unlocking the mysteries of Huntington's disease, a rare, incurable genetic disorder that slowly killed his wife and her father and three brothers.

Dr. Wexler launched what is now known as the Hereditary Disease Foundation in 1968, when his wife, Leonore Wexler, got the Huntington's diagnosis. She died in 1978

In the early 1970s, Dr. Wexler began to recruit young scientists to help find a cure. The workshops stressed brainstorming and were innovative in biomedical research.

In 1983, the scientists nurtured by Dr. Wexler - and later also by daughter Nancy Wexler, a clinical psychologist - found the genetic marker for Huntington's. In 1993, they located the gene itself.

He trained as a lawyer before becoming a psychoanalyst in the 1930s. In 1946, he joined the staff of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan., where his success treating schizophrenics gained attention. He moved to Los Angeles in 1951.

He found success treating clients well-known in Hollywood, even sharing a screenplay credit with director Blake Edwards, the husband of Julie Andrews, for the films The Man Who Loved Women and That's Life!

He is also survived by a second daughter, Alice Wexler, a historian, who wrote Mapping Fate, a 1995 memoir of her family's struggles. - AP