Richard Synge: The Biochemist Who Taught Us to Separate Life's Mixtures

On October twenty-eighth, nineteen fourteen, Richard Laurence Millington Synge was born in Liverpool, England. He was a biochemist, and his academic field was analytical biochemistry and separation science.

Synge is best known for his pioneering work in developing partition chromatography, together with his colleague Archer Martin. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, they worked on creating a method to efficiently separate and analyze complex mixtures of chemical substances, such as amino acids from proteins. Their brilliant insight was to use two immiscible liquids – one stationary and one mobile phase. As the mixture was allowed to move through a medium, the different components would partition themselves between the two liquids to varying degrees and thus move at different speeds, separating them. This method, published in nineteen forty-one, revolutionized biochemical analysis. It made it possible to identify and quantify the various amino acids that make up proteins, which was crucial for the emergence of molecular biology. For this invention, Synge and Martin were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in nineteen fifty-two.