Richard Laurence Millington Synge was born in
West Kirby on 28 October 1914, the son of Lawrence Millington Synge, a Liverpool stock-broker, and his wife, Katherine C. Swan. Synge was educated at the Old Hall in
Wellington, Shropshire and at
Winchester College. He then studied Chemistry at
Trinity College, Cambridge. He spent his entire career in research, at the
Wool Industries Research Association, Leeds (1941–1943),
Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine, London (1943–1948),
Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen (1948–1967), and
Food Research Institute, Norwich (1967–1976). It was during his time in
Leeds that he worked with
Archer Martin, developing
partition chromatography, a technique used in the separation mixtures of similar chemicals, that revolutionised analytical chemistry. Between 1942 and 1948 he studied
peptides of the protein group
gramicidin, work later used by
Frederick Sanger in determining the structure of
insulin. In March 1950 he was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society for which his candidature citation read: In 1963 he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were
Magnus Pyke,
Andrew Phillipson, Sir
David Cuthbertson and
John Andrew Crichton. He was for several years the treasurer of the Chemical Information Group of the
Royal Society of Chemistry, and was an honorary Professor in Biological Sciences at the
University of East Anglia from 1968 to 1984. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science (ScD) from the
University of East Anglia in 1977, and an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at
Uppsala University, Sweden in 1980. ==Personal life==