Synge, Richard Laurence Millington

British biochemist who improved paper chromatography (a means of separating mixtures) to the point where individual amino acids could be identified. He shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1952 with his colleague Archer Martin for the development in 1944 of the technique known as partition chromatography.

Martin and Synge worked together at Cambridge and at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds, Yorkshire. Their chromatographic method became an immediate success, widely adopted. It was soon demonstrated that not only the type but the concentration of each amino acid can be determined.