Lord Todd

Facts

Lord (Alexander R.) Todd

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

Lord (Alexander R.) Todd
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1957

Born: 2 October 1907, Glasgow, Scotland

Died: 10 January 1997, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Prize motivation: “for his work on nucleotides and nucleotide co-enzymes”

Prize share: 1/1

Work

The substances known as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) are found in nearly all cells in almost all organisms. The building blocks of DNA and RNA consist of nucleotides. In turn, these consist of what scientists call a nitrogen base, a sugar molecule, and one or more phosphate groups. Around 1940, Alexander Todd began to examine the composition of nucleotides more closely. Using chemical methods, Todd split nucleotides apart and compared their parts with substances that had been constructed from known components in a way that was already understood.

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