His research was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, where he was drafted to serve in the Swedish army.

He returned to the Karolinska Institutet where he earned his doctoral degree under advice from Professor Erik Jorpes in 1946.

At the time Edman started working on Angiotensin, it was just being recognized that proteins are distinct entities with a defined molecular mass, electric charge and structure.

When he returned to Sweden in 1950 to be an Assistant Professor at the University of Lund, he published his first paper using the method to determine the sequence of a protein,[2] later known as Edman degradation.

To his death, he continued to work to improve the method to be able to determine longer stretches with smaller amounts of sample.