In decades of single-minded devotion to science, she produced seminal findings about cancer, how it develops, how it may be treated and the genetics underlying those discoveries.
Beatrice Mintz, a scientist who, in decades of single-minded devotion to her research, produced seminal findings about cancer, how it develops, how it may be treated and the genetics underlying those discoveries, died Jan. 3 at her home in Elkins Park, Pa. She was 100.She had a heart ailment and dementia, said Bob Spallone, her power of attorney, executor and longtime colleague at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
She embarked on her career in the late 1940s, one of vanishingly few women pursuing scientific research at the time, and conducted her most significant studies at the institution that is now Fox Chase, where she arrived in 1960. Dr. Mintz also did pioneering work in transgenesis — the introduction of genetic material from one organism into another — often using specialized needles and other equipment that she built herself.“That same technology is still used to create models of all kinds of disease, not just cancer,” Jonathan Chernoff, the director of the Fox Chase Cancer Center, said in an interview.In 1971, President Richard M.