[1] 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.

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,[4] studying amphibians under Emil Witschi.

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.

[6] 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.

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.

[10] 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.

[1] Mintz received numerous awards and honors including the first Genetics Society of America Medal (1981),[11] and the first March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology shared with Ralph L. Brinster (1996).