15 Facts About Beatrice Mintz

Beatrice Mintz was an American embryologist who contributed to the understanding of genetic modification, cellular differentiation, and cancer, particularly melanoma.

Beatrice Mintz was a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

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.

Beatrice Mintz went on to create viable chimeric embryos containing blastomeres from up to fifteen different laboratory mice.

Beatrice Mintz developed a technique that involved mixing cells from a black mouse strain into the blastocysts of white or brown mice in vitro.

Since 1967 Beatrice Mintz has created more than 25,000 offspring using this technique.

Beatrice Mintz demonstrated that teratocarcinoma tumor cells could be reprogrammed to contribute to a healthy mouse when combined with normal mouse embryo cells through eight years of experiments using some of the first pluripotent stem cell cultures ever made.

Beatrice Mintz was interested in why only certain types of cancer occurred when he injected adult mice with viruses.

Beatrice Mintz agreed to work with Jaenisch, who joined her lab as a visiting fellow for nine months.

Beatrice Mintz was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Society, and won an honorary fellow of the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society since 1980.

Beatrice Mintz won the Papanicolaou Award for Scientific Achievement, the Amory Prize, the Ernst Jung Gold Medal for Medicine, the John Scott Medal, the American Cancer Society National Medal of Honor for Basic Research, a citation for Outstanding Woman in Science from the New York Academy of Sciences, and, in 2007, was a recipient of the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize.

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

Beatrice Mintz delivered dozens of special lectures, including the Ninetieth Anniversary Lecture at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and the first Frontiers in Biomedical Sciences Lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences.

Beatrice Mintz 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.

Beatrice Mintz died on January 3,2022, from heart failure, at age 100.