Richard Synge: The Wool Lab That Changed Chemistry
The most consequential chemical technique of the twentieth century was worked out in the laboratories of a trade body devoted to wool. In Leeds during the Second World War, Richard Laurence Millington Synge and Archer Martin were trying to separate the amino acids in wool fibres and found that existing methods could not distinguish molecules so nearly identical. What they invented instead — partition chromatography — gave chemists a general-purpose way to pull apart mixtures of closely related compounds. It won them the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and it made the sequencing of proteins possible.
A Stockbroker's Son
Synge was born on 28 October 1914 in West Kirby, on the Wirral peninsula near Liverpool — some sources give Liverpool itself. His father, Lawrence Millington Synge, was a Liverpool stockbroker; his mother was Katherine C. Swan. He was educated at Old Hall in Wellington, Shropshire, and then at Winchester College, one of the oldest of the English public schools, before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read chemistry.
The Problem of Telling Molecules Apart
From 1941 to 1943 Synge worked at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds. Wool is protein — keratin — and the practical questions the industry asked about it were, at bottom, questions about amino acid composition. The difficulty was fundamental. Amino acids resemble one another closely in size, solubility and chemical behaviour, and the analytical tools of the day could not reliably separate them.
Working with Archer Martin, Synge attacked the problem from a different direction. Rather than seeking a reaction that would isolate one compound, they exploited a physical fact: different substances partition differently between two immiscible liquid phases. Run a mixture past a stationary liquid phase held on a solid support, and each component will be retarded to a different degree, emerging separately. This was partition chromatography — a technique for separating mixtures of similar chemicals that, in the plain assessment of the record, revolutionised analytical chemistry.
Its virtue was generality. The method did not care what the mixture was. Amino acids, peptides, sugars, drugs, pigments, pollutants — all became separable, and separable in small quantities, which mattered enormously in biochemistry where material is scarce. Modern laboratory analysis, from clinical testing to drug development to forensic science, descends from that wartime work in Leeds.
Peptides and Gramicidin
From 1943 to 1948 Synge worked at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine in London, and across those years — roughly 1942 to 1948 — he applied the new technique to the peptides of the protein gramicidin, working out how its amino acid units were strung together.
This was the demonstration that mattered most. If chromatography could establish the order of residues in a peptide, then the sequence of a protein was in principle knowable rather than permanently mysterious. Synge's work directly informed Frederick Sanger's determination of the structure of insulin — the first complete protein sequence ever obtained, and the result that made molecular biology's central questions answerable. The chain runs from a wool laboratory to the sequencing of the genome.
Aberdeen and Norwich
In 1948 Synge moved to the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, where he remained for nineteen years, working in a centre devoted to nutrition and animal science. In 1967 he moved again, to the Food Research Institute in Norwich, staying until 1976. From 1968 to 1984 he was also Honorary Professor in Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia — a long association with the city where he spent the last three decades of his life.
Recognition
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950, at thirty-five. Two years later, in 1952, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Archer Martin for their invention of partition chromatography — an award, unusually, for a method rather than a discovery, and one of the clearest cases in the prize's history of a technique earning its place by what everyone else was able to do with it.
Further honours followed: the John Price Wetherill Medal in 1959, fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1963, an honorary ScD from the University of East Anglia in 1977, and an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 1980.
Family and Death
In 1943 Synge married Ann Davies Stephen, daughter of the psychologist Karin Stephen and the psychoanalyst Adrian Stephen — a marriage that connected him to one of the more remarkable intellectual families of English modernism. She survived him by three years.
Synge died in Norwich on 18 August 1994, aged seventy-nine. The technique he devised in a wool research laboratory before he was thirty had by then become so ordinary a part of scientific practice that it was rarely credited to anyone — which is, for a method, the highest form of success.
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