She was born and educated in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and survived The Holocaust by inclusion in the Kindertransport, 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 was "Genetika isoamylas: Studie nového lidského polymorfismu." (in English: "Genetics of Isoamylases: 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 at the Kennedy-Galton Centre for Medical and Community Genetics in London on mental retardation. She was appointed to the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975, where she worked in its research center for human developmental disabilities, the Waisman Center, on prenatal diagnosis and genetics counseling. She became professor emeritus in 2003.