Beatrice Mintz, American Embryologist
Beatrice Mintz (born January 24, 1921) is an American embryologist who has contributed to the understanding of genetic modification, cellular differentiation and cancer, particularly melanoma. She was a pioneer of genetic engineering techniques, and was among the first scientists to generate both chimeric and transgenic mammals. She 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. 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 color. In other studies, She demonstrated that, when combined with normal mouse embryo cells, teratocarcinoma tumor cells could be reprogrammed to contribute to a healthy mouse. These experiments, which took eight years, utilized some of the first pluripotent stem cell cultures ever made. In 1996 she shared the inaugural March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology with Ralph Brinster for their work in developing transgenic mice. She is a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
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