Richards was born in
Stamford, New York the son of Rev. Leonard E. Richards and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Burbank. He was educated at the
Stamford Seminary and Union Free School. He then studied at
Yale University. He served as chairman of the
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's department of pharmacology from 1910 to 1946 and was the university's vice president of medical affairs from 1939 to 1948. In 1941, then U.S. President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Richards chairman of the Committee on Medical Research. The office was terminated five years later, in 1946, after which Richards became president of the
National Academy of Sciences, serving until 1950. In 1948, President
Harry Truman appointed Richards to the Medical Affairs Task Force of the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government; Richards also became a director of
Merck & Co., for which he had consulted since 1931, and an associate trustee of the
University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia in 1948. ==Family==