He emigrated to the United States in 1948 and obtained American citizenship.
It is also known as Bartholin-Patau syndrome, since the clinical picture associated with trisomy 13 was described by Thomas Bartholin in 1656.
[4] Patau was in the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as was his wife and collaborator, the Finnish cytogeneticist Eeva Therman (1916–2004).
His son, Peter Hinrich Patau (1942—2017), was a journalist who contributed to several Wisconsin publications.
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