Jack Greenblatt retires from teaching after 49 years of professorship

As Jack Greenblatt gives a speech at his retirement party, he reminds the crowd, again, that he is not actually retiring. No one who knows Jack personally is surprised; even at 80 years old, the trailblazer still has five years of grants left and concrete plans to carry out the research paths he’s been following for nearly five decades. 

“Amazingly, half a century after I began studying transcriptional anti-termination in E. coli at the University of Toronto, we are still studying transcription termination and anti-termination,” says Greenblatt. “Only now our focus is on cleavage and polyadenylation, which regulate transcription termination in human and other eukaryotic cells.”

“Jack may be the one continuous and recognizable feature that links all variations of the Department of Molecular Genetics together, and thus, could be considered a defining feature of our department,” says Hughes. “Like another archetype, the coelacanth, Jack himself is virtually unchanged from the time I got here in 2001. At the time, he was already well known for his hands-off supervisory style—which produces a great deal of anxiety in the graduate office... while also regularly producing strong and independent minds.” 

Colleagues, family, and past and present students gathered at the Faculty Club to celebrate this milestone in Greenblatt’s life, and a half-century of trailblazing research. 

“There's a famous hockey player that said you need to skate where the puck goes, not where it is,” says Stephane Angers, PI, professor, and director of the Donnelly Centre. “Jack has anticipated where biology was going his whole career.”