At Wesleyan, Blakeslee played several sports and won academic prizes in mathematics and chemistry.

[2] After graduating from Wesleyan, Blakeslee taught at the Montpelier Seminary in Vermont, as well as at the East Greenwich Academy.

In 1941, Blakeslee retired from the Carnegie Institution and returned to academia, accepting a professorship at Smith College.

His experiments included using colchicine to achieve an increase in the number of chromosomes, which opened up a new field of research,[3] creating artificial polyploids and aneuploids, and studying the phenotypic effects of polyploidy and of individual chromosomes.

In fact some people were seriously poisoned when they ate tomatoes grown from a scion that had been grafted onto a Jimson weed stock.