Renata Laxova, Ph.D., a paediatric geneticist, is Emeritus Professor of Genetics at the Departments of Pediatrics and Medical Genetics, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the discover of the Neu-Laxová syndrome, a rare congenital abnormality involving multiple organs, with autosomal recessive inheritance.

She was born and educated in Brno

Brno

Brno by population and area is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, the largest Moravian city, and the historical capital city of the Margraviate of Moravia. Brno is the administrative centre of the South Moravian Region where it forms a separate district Brno-City District...

, Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

, and survived the Holocaust by inclusion in the Kindertransport

Kindertransport

Kindertransport is the name given to the rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig...

, and spent the war years in England. She returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, received a medical degree and training as a pediatrician there. Her Doctoral thesis from the University of Brno

Masaryk University

Masaryk University is the second largest university in the Czech Republic, a member of the Compostela Group and the Utrecht Network. Founded in 1919 in Brno as the third Czech university , it now consists of nine faculties and 42,182 students...

 was Genetika isoamylas: Studie nového lidského polymorfismu. (in English: "Genetics isoamylas: Study of the New Human Polymorphism") in 1967. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, she escaped a second time to England, where she worked with Lionel Penrose

Lionel Penrose

Lionel Sharples Penrose, FRS was a British psychiatrist, medical geneticist, mathematician and chess theorist, who carried out pioneering work on the genetics of mental retardation. He was educated at the Quaker Leighton Park School and St...

 at the Kennedy-Galton Center in London on mental retardation. She was then appointed to the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she worked in its research center for human developmental disabilities, the Waisman Center on prenatal diagnosis and genetics counseling.

Laxova is the author of 64 peer-reviewed papers, as shown in Scopus

Scopus

Scopus, officially named SciVerse Scopus, is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. It covers nearly 18,000 titles from over 5,000 international publishers, including coverage of 16,500 peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical,...

. Her most cited are:

• "Diagnostic criteria for Walker-Warburg syndrome" by Dobyns, W.B., Pagon, R.A., Armstrong, D., Curry, C.J.R., Greenberg, F., Grix, A., Holmes, L.B., Laxova, R., Michels, V.V., Robinow, M., Zimmerman, R.L. American Journal of Medical Genetics Volume 32, Issue 2, 1989, Pages 195-210. Cited 207 times
• "The critical region of the human Xq" by Therman, E., Laxova, R., Susman, B. Human Genetics Volume 85, Issue 5, 1990, Pages 455-461 cited 85 times
• "Mutations of the P gene in oculocutaneous albinism, ocular albinism, and Prader-Willi syndrome plus albinism" by Lee, S.-T. , Nicholls, R.D. , Bundey, S. , Laxova, R. , Musarella, M. , Spritz, R.A. New England Journal of Medicine Volume 330, Issue 8, 24 February 1994, Pages 529-534, cited 80 times.

External links

• [Oral history program interview with Renata Laxova, 2008 by Renata Laxova; Robert Lange; University of Wisconsin–Madison. Archives. Oral History Program.