The Wool Industries Research Association was an industrial research organization in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. It later became the Wira Technology Group before being merged with the

Shirley Institute The Shirley Institute was established in 1920 as the British Cotton Industry Research Association at The Towers in Didsbury, Manchester, as a research centre dedicated to cotton production technologies. It was funded by the Cotton Board through ...

in the 1989 to form the

British Textile Technology Group British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

. It was funded by a levy raised under powers from the

Industrial Organisation and Development Act 1947 The Industrial Organisation and Development Act 1947 ( 10 & 11 Geo. 6. c. 40) enabled the creation of industrial development boards with powers to raise levies from specific industrial sectors in the United Kingdom for co-ordinated action, partic ...

through the Wool Textile Research Council, established in 1950.

Notable employees

Richard Laurence Millington Synge Richard Laurence Millington Synge FRS FRSE FRIC FRSC MRIA (Liverpool, 28 October 1914 – Norwich, 18 August 1994) was a British biochemist, and shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of partition chromatography with Archer ...

* Jim Marshall (UK politician) *

David Cox (statistician) Sir David Roxbee Cox (15 July 1924 – 18 January 2022) was a British statistician and educator. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of statistics included introducing logistic regression, the proportional hazards model and the Cox pro ...

* Archer J.P. Martin

Martin and Synge

Archer J.P. Martin and Richard L.M. Synge worked together at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds. In 1941 they published a paper entitled ‘A New Form of Chromatogram Employing Two Liquid Phases’ in the Biochemical Journal. Martin and Synge described how they had used columns of silica with water, used as the stationary phase, whilst a second, non-miscible liquid, flowed down the column. The second liquid was the organic solvent chloroform, and they separated acetamino-acids from protein hydrolysates. The components of the mixture separated were distributed between the two phases, depending on their relative affinity for each of the phases. As the components spread, they became separated from each other, and could be collected as they left the column. This is how ‘partition chromatography’ came to be known as a new form of chromatography due to the way that the sample ‘partitioned’ itself between the two liquid phases. Their paper was important because it laid the foundations of all the future work in the field of chromatography. In the first part of the paper they presented the first ever theory of chromatography that attempted to explain the concentration of the solute at any point in the column and also how the resolution of the column was affected by various factors including the column's length. Looking at the figures they present for resolution in terms of Height Equivalent to a Theoretical Plate (HETP), underlying the importance of their work at that time. The HETP is a measure of the resolution that can be obtained by the column. There are several factors that affect HETP.

References

Research institutes in the United Kingdom Woollen industry Textile industry of the United Kingdom Textile organizations {{sci-org-stub