Richard Synge made important contributions in the fields of physical chemistry and biochemistry. He is best known for the development of partition chromatography, a collaborative effort undertaken with A. J. P. Martin in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As a result of their work, Synge and Martin received the 1952 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Richard Laurence Millington Synge was born on October 28, 1914, in Liverpool, England, to Laurence Millington Synge, a stockbroker, and Katherine Charlotte (Swan) Synge. He was the oldest of three children and the only son. After growing up in the Cheshire area of England, he attended Winchester College, a private preparatory school, where he won a classics scholarship to attend Trinity College at Cambridge University. After listening to a speech given by the noted biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins, however, he decided to forego his education in the classics and instead pursue a degree in biochemistry at...