Blakeslee, Albert Francis (1874–1954)

US botanist who was the first to artificially produce polyploid plants (plants having three or more sets of chromosomes per cell in cases where the normal number is two sets). He developed the technique using the chemical colchicine to increase the number of chromosomes.

Blakeslee was born in Geneseo, New York, and graduated 1896 from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Until 1899 he taught mathematics and science in a preparatory school, but then went to Harvard to do graduate research, obtaining his PhD 1904. He demonstrated that lower fungi can reproduce sexually in his PhD thesis which was on Sexual Reproduction in the Mucorineae. He went to Connecticut Agricultural College, Storrs, where he was a professor until 1914.

In 1915, he moved to the Carnegie Institution experimental laboratories at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York, where he continued his research into plant genetics. In 1936, he was promoted to director of the institute. He was then made professor of botany at Smith College, Northampton, where he founded a Genetics Experimental Station.