Diner: "I would like a cup of coffee, please."
Waiter: "I'm very sorry, sir, but I'm afraid we're fresh out of coffee today; our coffee maker has been completely exhausted."
Diner: "I'm not surprised, due to how weak it's been lately."
Richard SyngeDied 18 Aug 1994 at age 79 (born 28 Oct 1914).Richard Laurence Millington Synge was a British biochemist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with A.J.P. Martin for their development of partition chromatography, notably paper chromatography. Some of chemistry's advances need new methods for separating various substances. In filter-paper chromatography, a drop of a mixture of substances is dropped on a strip of filter paper, which is allowed to draw up a suitable solvent (ex. butyl alcohol-water), by capillary action. The spot begins to move, then gradually segregates into several spots. Some spots rapidly follow the solvent, while others lag behind. The result is a resolution of the mixture into component parts. One drop of extremely complicated mixtures can be analyzed in this simple way. |
