Born: 24 January 1921, United States
Died: 3 January 2022
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Born in 1921, Dr. Beatrice Mintz was a groundbreaking cancer researcher and embryologist who helped increase our understanding of mammalian development—or as one scientist put it, “She did so many important things … She was one of the foundational figures, immensely influential.” Originally intending to study art history, she instead earned a biology degree from Hunter College in New York in 1941, going on to complete her Master’s and doctorate at the University of Iowa. It was while teaching at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1960 that she started to consider how a single fertilized cell develops into a complete, complex organism.
In 1960, she was offered a position at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, enabling her to stop teaching and focus on research full-time. “She had strong confidence in her own ability to identify important problems, important things to do,” a colleague later recalled. “She wanted to get at the fundamentals of embryology and development. And she devised experiments to attack them.” One of the first of these experiments was investigating the research potential of mixing cells from two different mouse embryos, creating what is called a chimera (though she didn’t like the “monstrous” connotation of the term, which derives from Greek mythology), at a time when researchers didn’t even know if such an embryo would be viable.
Mintz was interested in the research potential of producing such mice, and the full importance of this work wouldn’t become clear until the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
By combining her chimeric mice embryos with teratomas (tumors), she found that cancer cells could be reprogrammed, and later developed a mouse model—lab mice used to study different conditions—of human melanoma (skin cancer). She also introduced foreign DNA, creating “transgenic” mice whose genetic code had been artificially altered. Her work helped shape the nature and direction of cancer research for decades to come.