Most people underestimate time. We think of effort as something you can measure in hours, days, maybe a few years at best. We live in startup time—sprints, ship cycles, quarterly OKRs. But there’s another kind of time, one that runs on decades. That’s the time Nancy Wexler lived in.

The Beginning of a Long Game

In 1968, at a scientific workshop in California, Wexler started asking a question that few biologists then knew how to answer: could a single gene explain Huntington’s disease? The idea was radical at the time. The word “genomics” didn’t even exist yet. The structure of DNA had been described only 15 years earlier, and gene mapping was still a dream.

But she started assembling something that looked like the early stages of a startup: a group of committed, curious people willing to bet their lives on an impossible problem. Except her startup wasn’t software—it was a human genome.

Most founders think they know what long-term persistence means. They imagine working on something for five years, maybe ten. But for Wexler, the time horizon was geologic. Fifteen years passed before her team even found the chromosome that contained the Huntington’s gene. Another ten years went by before they pinpointed the gene itself.

Imagine the daily grind of that kind of work: thousands of failed leads, false hypotheses, bureaucratic barriers, and the endless uncertainty of whether you’re even looking in the right place. Most people would have given up long before the first decade. She didn’t. Not because she knew she’d win, but because she refused to stop trying.

Venezuela: The Living Map

The key moment came when Wexler learned about a remote community near Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. Generations of families there had suffered from what locals called el mal de San Vito—the dancing madness. It was Huntington’s disease. And because these families had massive, well-documented family trees, they held something invaluable: genetic data on an unprecedented scale.

So Wexler went to Venezuela. Not for a weekend, not for a few months, but year after year for decades. Her team collected over 4,000 blood samples and mapped more than 18,000 people across 10 generations. The data they gathered became the largest human pedigree ever constructed.

It’s easy to romanticize this now, but the reality was brutal. Long, humid days, power outages, lost samples, endless paperwork. And behind every test tube was a human story—someone who knew they might carry the gene that would one day destroy their mind. Wexler wasn’t just doing fieldwork; she was confronting the emotional reality of her own possible fate. Her mother had died from Huntington’s. Statistically, Nancy had a 50% chance of carrying the same gene. She refused to find out. She said she didn’t want to live under the shadow of a test result.

It’s hard to think of another scientist who worked so long and so hard on a problem that was, quite literally, a matter of life and death for themselves.

The 1983 Breakthrough: A Chromosome, Not Yet a Cure

After fifteen years, in 1983, Wexler’s team announced a breakthrough: they had identified the region of the genome—on chromosome 4—where the Huntington’s gene must reside. It was the first time scientists had mapped a human disease gene using a method called “genetic linkage analysis.” It was the prototype for the Human Genome Project, which wouldn’t begin until seven years later.

This moment changed biology. It showed that genes could be tracked like suspects in a crime. It gave scientists a new way to understand not just Huntington’s, but all genetic diseases. Cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s—all those discoveries followed the same logic pioneered by Wexler’s team.

But even then, the job wasn’t done. It would take another decade to isolate the gene itself. Ten more years of meticulous genetic detective work before, in 1993, the culprit was finally caught: a DNA sequence with an abnormally repeated pattern—CAG, over and over again. Too many repeats, and the brain begins to self-destruct.

Wexler had done what everyone said was impossible: find the gene for a fatal, complex brain disorder. It took her 25 years from her first workshop to the final discovery.

The Meaning of 25 Years

Twenty-five years is long enough to raise children, change industries, or start and sell multiple companies. It’s the span between the invention of the personal computer and the rise of the iPhone. In science, 25 years is eternity. Yet Wexler stayed on course without the typical feedback loops that keep people going—no quarterly wins, no clear milestones, no public adoration.

Why? Because she redefined what progress meant. Progress wasn’t success; it was persistence. Progress was showing up, year after year, even when nothing seemed to move. She often said that the most important skill in science wasn’t genius but stubbornness. She was right.

That’s what makes her story so relevant today, especially in an age obsessed with velocity. We talk about “move fast and break things.” But Wexler’s version might be “move steady and never break.” Her work shows that not all velocity is visible. Sometimes the fastest path to discovery is a straight line through decades of slow, quiet, consistent labor.

A Story of Tenacity

Tenacity is often described as a kind of grim determination—a refusal to give up despite suffering. But Wexler practiced what I call a positive tenacity: an optimistic, forward-looking kind of persistence rooted in purpose, not pain. She didn’t simply push through misery; she transformed it into continuous motion over a long-period of time.

People who knew her described her as radiant, warm, and relentlessly optimistic. She brought music and humor into the field camps in Venezuela. She danced with the families who carried the gene she was trying to defeat. She made the work human. That’s what made people follow her for decades. Not her authority, but her energy.

Positive tenacity is rare because it’s incredibly hard. It’s easy to keep going when you’re angry or desperate; rage is fuel. But it burns out. Wexler’s kind of persistence came from something deeper—a faith that meaning itself could be built through effort. She turned grief into purpose, and purpose into endurance.

There’s a lesson here for anyone working on long-term projects—founders, scientists, artists. You can’t survive on intensity alone. You need a way to metabolize failure into momentum. You need what Wexler had: a way to find joy and purpose in the act of continuing.

The Legacy of Patience

By the time the Huntington’s gene was identified in 1993, Wexler was already a legend. She’d become a symbol of what the human mind can endure when powered by purpose. But her influence didn’t stop there. The methods she pioneered laid the groundwork for mapping thousands of other genes. Her Venezuela database is still one of the most important resources in genetic research today.

And yet, she remained modest. When asked how she managed to persist for so long, she’d say something deceptively simple: “You just keep going.” It’s the same advice she gave to students and young scientists. Keep going. Because the alternative is to stop, and stopping guarantees failure.

There’s a quiet revolution in how we think about success when we study people like Wexler. Most of us measure progress by visible outcomes—product launches, funding rounds, press releases. But real progress, the kind that shifts the world, often looks like nothing for a very long time.

Wexler’s story reminds us that persistence isn’t just a virtue; it’s a method that stood the test of time. Long before machine learning or CRISPR, she taught us the original algorithm for discovery: patience, curiosity, and tenacity over time.

If you’re building something that matters, it’s worth remembering this: what feels slow now might later look inevitable. Velocity doesn’t always mean speed; sometimes it means direction held for decades.

A Human Equation

There’s a line from one of Wexler’s colleagues that captures her legacy perfectly: “She didn’t just find a gene. She found a way to make science human.”

That might be her greatest discovery. In the end, science isn’t about perfection or certainty. It’s about people. About the stubborn hope that we can understand and, maybe, heal ourselves.

Wexler’s 25-year journey is more than a story of genetic triumph, it’s a parable about what humans can do when they align grief with purpose. She turned tragedy into a system of action, a shared story to tell for generations.

Her story of tenacity doesn’t end when the experiment does. It ripples outward—into labs, companies, and lives that will never know her name. And that’s how you measure the true half-life of progress: by the enduring persistence it leaves behind.

In the end, Nancy Wexler proved something that startup founders, scientists, and anyone chasing the improbable should never forget: time is not your enemy if you make it your partner. Positive tenacity is the art of turning decades into momentum. And momentum, when held long enough, becomes history and part of our civilization.