Richard Laurence Millington Synge

Richard Laurence Millington Synge
(1914-1994)

British biochemist who improved paper chromatography (a means of separating mixtures) to the point where individual amino acids could be identified. He developed the technique, known as partition chromatography, with his colleague Archer Martin 1944. They shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Synge was born in Liverpool and studied at Cambridge. From 1967 until his retirement in 1974 he worked as a biochemist at the Food Research Institute of the Agricultural Research Council in Norwich.
Martin and Synge worked together at Cambridge and at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds. Their chromatographic method became an immediate success, widely adopted. It was soon demonstrated that not only the type but the concentration of each amino acid can be determined.