Beatrice Mintz

Beatrice Mintz (January 24, 1921 – January 3, 2022) was an American embryologist who contributed to the understanding of genetic modification, cellular differentiation, and cancer, particularly melanoma. Mintz was a pioneer of genetic engineering techniques and was among the first scientists to generate both chimeric and transgenic mammals. Mintz was a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Early life and education Beatrice Mintz was born in New York City on January 24, 1921, to Samuel and Janie Stein Mintz, a Jewish couple from Mikulintsy, then in Austrian Galicia, now in Ukraine. She was graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College in 1941 (1946–60; Mintz went on to create viable chimeric embryos containing blastomeres from up to fifteen different laboratory mice. Her cell fusion technique was successful where others had failed due to the choice to remove the zona pellucida with pronase treatment, rather than physically. Since 1967 Mintz has created more than 25,000 offspring using this technique. through eight years of experiments using some of the first pluripotent stem cell cultures ever made. Mintz agreed to work with Jaenisch, who joined her lab as a visiting fellow for nine months. They showed that DNA from a virus, SV40, could be integrated into the DNA of developing mice and persist into adulthood without apparent tumor formation.

Although only somatic cells were affected, meaning the DNA would not be passed on to future generations, these were the first mice ever made with foreign DNA and this experiment proved healthy genetically modified mammals could be created by viral infection. Using these techniques Mintz was able to establish the genetic basis of certain kinds of cancer and, in 1993, she produced the first mouse model of human melanoma. and the first March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology shared with Ralph L. Brinster (1996). American Association for the Advancement of Science (1973), the American Philosophical Society (1982), and won an honorary fellow of the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society since 1980. She won the Papanicolaou Award for Scientific Achievement (1979), the Amory Prize (1988), the Ernst Jung Gold Medal for Medicine (1990), the John Scott Medal (1994), the American Cancer Society National Medal of Honor for Basic Research (1997), a citation for Outstanding Woman in Science (1993) from the New York Academy of Sciences, and, in 2007, was a recipient of the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. She received the Quantrell Award.

On March 8, 2011, the U.S. National Foundation for Cancer Research awarded Beatrice Mintz its Sixth Annual Szent-Gyorgyi Prize for Progress in Cancer Research.

In 2012, Mintz was awarded the Ninth Annual AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research.

She received honorary doctorate degrees from five universities. She delivered dozens of special lectures, including the Ninetieth Anniversary Lecture at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (1978) and the first Frontiers in Biomedical Sciences Lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences (1980). She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a senior member of the Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and served on the editorial boards of various scientific journals.

Personal life and death Mintz died on January 3, 2022, from heart failure, at age 100. She had dementia in her later years.