Haunted by a Gene

Dr. Nancy Wexler spent the last 40 years researching Huntington’s disease, a gradual debilitating hereditary disease, venturing in remote parts of Venezuela to study large extended families with high rates of the disease.

For the first time, the biomedical researcher reveals that she inherited the disease she has spent her life studying.

Year after year for two decades, Nancy Wexler led medical teams into remote villages in Venezuela, where huge extended families lived in stilt houses on Lake Maracaibo and for generations, had suffered from a terrible hereditary disease that causes brain degeneration, disability and death.