Todd held posts with the
Lister Institute, the
University of Edinburgh (staff, 1934–1936) and the
University of London, where he was appointed
Reader in biochemistry. In 1938, Alexander Todd spent six months as a visiting professor at
California Institute of Technology, eventually declining an offer of faculty position. Todd became the
Sir Samuel Hall Chair of Chemistry and director of the Chemical Laboratories of the
University of Manchester in 1938, where he began working on nucleosides, compounds that form the structural units of nucleic acids (
DNA and
RNA). At 31, he was the youngest professor of chemistry since Frankland. He was elected to membership of the
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1938. In 1944, he was appointed to the
1702 Chair of Chemistry in the
University of Cambridge, which he held until his retirement in 1971. In 1955, he helped elucidate the structure of
vitamin B12, although the final formula and definite structure was determined by
Dorothy Hodgkin and her team, and later worked on the structure and synthesis of
vitamin B1 and
vitamin E, the
anthocyanins (the pigments of flowers and fruits) from insects (aphids, beetles) and studied
alkaloids found in
cannabis. He served as chairman of the
Government of the United Kingdom's advisory committee on
scientific policy from 1952 to 1964. He is credited as the first person to synthesize
H4-CBD and
H2-CBD from
Cannabidiol by
hydrogenation as early as 1940. He received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on nucleotides and nucleotide co-enzymes." Elected a
Fellow of
Christ's College, Cambridge in 1944, he served as
Master from 1963 to 1978. Lord Todd became the first
Chancellor of the new
University of Strathclyde in 1965, and a visiting professor at
Hatfield Polytechnic (1978–1986). Among his many honours, including over 40 honorary degrees, he was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1942, a member of the United States
National Academy of Sciences in 1955, a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957, and the
American Philosophical Society in 1965.
President of the Royal Society from 1975 to 1980, The Queen awarded him
the Order of Merit in 1977. In 1981, Todd became a founding member of the
World Cultural Council. ==Personal life and death==