Together with Alfred Mirsky, Anson was the first to propose that conformational protein folding was a reversible process.
In 1937, Anson first purified and crystallized carboxypeptidase A, a classic model system of protein science.
In 1944 Anson was, with J. T. Edsall, the founding editor of Advances in Protein Chemistry, which remains one of the leading journals for reviewing the state of biochemical problems.
Anson conceived the journal in long discussions with Kurt Jacoby, who had fled Nazi Germany and had once headed the Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft in Leipzig.
Anson was haunted by the suffering caused in the underdeveloped world by poor nutrition, and in 1942, left a prestigious research position at the Rockefeller Institute to investigate biochemical and genetic methods for improving the nutrition of foods, e.g., amino acid fortification.