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Richard Laurence Millington Synge28.10.1914
Richard Laurence Millington Synge (Liverpool, 28 October 1914 - Norwich, 18 August 1994) was a British biochemist, and shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of partition chromatography with Archer Martin.
He was a close friend of John H. Humphrey. Educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent his entire career in research, at locations including Wool Industries Research Association, Leeds (1941–1943), Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine, London (1943–1948), Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen (1948–1967), and Food Research Institute, Norwich (1967–1976).
It was during his time in Leeds that he worked with Archer Martin, developing partition chromatography, a technique used in the separation mixtures of similar chemicals, that revolutionized analytical chemistry. Between 1942 and 1948 he studied peptides of the protein group gramicidin, work later used by Frederick Sanger in determining the structure of insulin. In March 1950 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He was for several years the treasurer of the Chemical Information Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and held a Professorship in Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia from 1968–1984.
