text: Alastair Ian Scott  (10 April 1928 in Glasgow – 18 April 2007) was a British-American organic chemist who achieved international renown for elucidating the biosynthetic pathway of vitamin B12.
  He occupied successive chairs of organic chemistry at the universities of British Columbia, Sussex, and Yale before moving to Texas A&M University in 1977. In 1980 he occupied the [http://ourhistory.is.ed.ac.uk/index.php/Chemistry#Forbes_Chair_of_Organic_Chemistry Forbes chair of organic Chemistry] at the University of Edinburgh. He was named a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry in 1981 at Texas A&M University, and remained there until the end of his career.
  In 1964 he won the Corday-Morgan Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). He was awarded the 1975 Ernest Guenther Award and the 1994 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award by the American Chemical Society (ACS). He gave the RSC Centenary Lecture in 1994 and the Royal Society Bakerian Lecture in 1996. He took the Tetrahedron Prize (1995), the RSC Natural Products Award (1996), the Welch Award in Chemistry (2000), the Royal Societys Davy Medal (2001), the Queens Royal Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2001), and the ACS Nakanishi Prize (2003). He was Texas Scientist of the Year in 2002.
  He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the European Academy of Sciences. In addition, he was an honorary member of the Japanese Pharmacological Society.