Beatrice Mintz was born to Samuel and Janie Stein Mintz, a Jewish family from Mikulintsy, Austria which was part of what was then called Galicia. She graduatedmagna cum laude from Hunter College in 1941 and then took graduate studies at New York University for a year. Because of anti Semitic admissions quotas in the colleges on the east coast, she attended the University of Iowa where she received a Master's degree in 1944 and a Ph.D. in 1946, studying amphibians under Emil Witschi.
Research
After graduation, Mintz accepted a Professorship in Biological Science at the University of Chicago. In 1960 she moved to the Institute for Cancer Research of the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute, which became the Fox Chase Cancer Center in 1974, where she remains on faculty. In the mid 1950s, Mintz switched her research focus from amphibians to mammals and became a pioneer in mammalian transgenesis. In 1965 she became an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Mintz and Kristoph Tarkowski independently made the first mouse embryonic chimeras in the 1960s by aggregating two embryos at the eight-cell stage. The resultant mice developed normally and their tissues were a mixture of cells derived from the two donor embryos. Mintz went on to create viable chimeric embryos containing blastomeres from up to fifteen different laboratory mice. She developed a technique that involved mixing cells from a black mouse strain into the blastocysts of white or brown mice in vitro. She then surgically transferred these early embryos into surrogate mothers and, after birth, traced the tissue contribution of each cell type made by studying the coat colour. 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 over 25,000 offspring using this technique. Mintz also 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 utilizing some of the first pluripotent stem cell cultures ever made. Mintz and Rudolf Jaenisch published a technological breakthrough in 1974. Jaenisch was a post-doctoral researcher in Princeton University at the time and was interested in why only certain types of cancer occurred when he injected adult mice with viruses. Inspired by Mintz's earlier work, he wanted to know whether injecting virus into early-stage embryos would result in the DNA being incorporated, and what types of cancer would occur. Mintz agreed to work with Jaenisch, who joined her lab as a visiting fellow for 9 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 malignant melanoma.
