Richard Laurence Millington Synge

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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

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.