Nancy Sabin Wexler, PhD, has devoted her career to finding treatments and a cure for Huntington’s disease. She pioneered groundbreaking fieldwork that, in 1983, enabled the identification of a genetic marker for HD — a discovery that helped launch the Human Genome Project — and in 1993, led to the HD-causing gene itself. She has presided over the Huntington’s Disease Foundation (HDF) for over forty years and has been an eloquent voice for patients in genetic research and an insistent advocate for ethical use of genome sequence information.
Assisted by writer Mark Hampton and by her sister, writer and historian Alice Wexler, Nancy has recently published a memoir of her journey as both an HD scientist and a woman navigating life at risk for HD, and finally, as a person living with the disease she had hoped to cure. With Alice’s assistance, HD Insights had the opportunity to ask Nancy about her hopes for the book and for the future of HD research.