Richard Laurence Millington Synge

@Trinity College, Cambridge, Family and Personal Life

Richard L

Oct 28, 1914

BritishTrinity College, CambridgeScientistsBiochemistsScorpio Celebrities
Biography

Personal Details

  • Birthday: October 28, 1914
  • Died on: August 18, 1994
  • Nationality: British
  • Famous: Trinity College, Cambridge, Scientists, Biochemists
  • Spouses: Ann Stephen
  • Childrens: Alexander Millington, Charlotte, Elizabeth, Jane, Mary, Matthew Millington, Patrick Millington
  • Universities:
    • Trinity College, Cambridge
    • Winchester College
    • Trinity College
    • Cambridge

Richard Laurence Millington Synge born at

Liverpool, England

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Birth Place

He married Ann Stephen in 1943 and had four daughters, Jane, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Mary and three sons, Matthew Millington, Patrick Millington and Alexander Millington from the marriage.

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Personal Life

He suffered from gout, temporal arteritis and myelodysplasia in the later years of his life.

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Personal Life

Richard L. M. Synge died in Norwich, Norfolk, England on August 18, 1994.

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Personal Life

Richard L. M. Synge was born in Liverpool, England on October 28, 1914. His father, Laurence Millington Synge was a stockbroker and his mother was Katharine Charlotte Swan. He had a sister named Anthea.

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Childhood & Early Life

He did his initial schooling from ‘Old Hall’, a prep school in Wellington.

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Childhood & Early Life

He joined the ‘Winchester College’ in Winchester, UK, in 1928 and mainly studied classics up to 1931. He then changed over to natural sciences and studied science subjects till 1933. He earned a ‘Classics Scholarship’ to study natural sciences at the Trinity College from here.

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Childhood & Early Life

He joined the ‘Trinity College’ under the ‘Cambridge University’ in 1933, studied physics, chemistry, physiology for the ‘Natural Sciences Tripos’ Part I up to 1935 and then biochemistry for the part II portion up to 1936. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1935 and his master’s degree in 1936 with a double First and was accepted as a research student.

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Childhood & Early Life

From 1936 to 1939 he worked as a research student at the ‘University Biochemical Laboratory’, which was headed by Sir Fredrick G. Hopkins, under the supervision of N. W. Pirie. He earned his PhD from the ‘Trinity College’ in 1941.

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Childhood & Early Life

Richard L. M. Synge worked at the ‘Wool Industries Research Association’ under the ‘British Textile Technology Group’ from 1939 to 1943. There he met Archer J. P. Martin who was already trying to build an apparatus that could be used for chromatography.

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Career

Synge and Martin together built an operational apparatus with which they developed the technique of separating the constituents of closely related chemicals such as amino acids which could then be studied further.

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Career

Synge and Martin gave a demonstration of their work to the ‘Biochemical Society’ on June 7, 1941 at the ‘National Institute for Medical Research’ in London.

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Career

Synge and Martin were especially successful with their development of the paper-chromatography technique which was used later by Synge to find out the exact structure of a molecule of the protein ‘gramicidin S’. This technique was used by Fredrick Sanger, an English Biochemist, to find the structure of insulin later.

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Career

He joined the ‘Biochemistry Department’ of the ‘Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, London’ in 1943 and worked there under W. T. J. Morgan till 1948 exclusively on the antibiotic peptides of the ‘gramicidin group’.

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Career

Synge and Martin published the results of their work on paper-partition chromatography in the ‘Biochemical Journal’ in 1941.

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Major Works

He collaborated with Archer Martin in writing the book ‘Separation of Higher Monoamino-Acids by Counter-Current Liquid-liquid Extraction: The Amino-Acid Composition of Wool’ which was published in 1941.

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Major Works