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. In 1996, she shared the inaugural March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology with Ralph L. Brinster for their work in developing transgenic mice. Much of her career was spent at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia where, in 2002, she was appointed to the Jack Schultz Chair in Basic Science. 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 and then took graduate studies at New York University for a year. Because of anti-Semitic quotas for admission to colleges on the east coast, she attended the University of Iowa, where she received a master's degree in 1944 and her Ph.D. in 1946, studying amphibians under Emil Witschi. Research After graduation, Mintz accepted a professorship in biological science at the University of Chicago (1946–60; interrupted by studies abroad: Mintz was awarded a Fulbright research fellowship at the universities of Paris and Strasbourg in 1951). 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 remained 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 Andrzej K. 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