He contributed many key experimental and theoretical results and developed new methods, garnering over 20,000 journal citations in several quite distinct research areas.

The family usually spent summers in Connecticut, giving Richards an early affinity for the area which continued through his career at Yale University.

[7] He attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, and later recalled that "the excellent science department even permitted certain students the unsupervised run of the laboratories outside of class hours.

[6] With strong science interests, Richards thwarted his family's expectations by choosing MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) rather than Yale for college in 1943, majoring in chemistry.

[7] He also absorbed the scientific and mentorship style of Lang, who Richards called "a delightful individual, full of fun and jokes as well as science" exemplifying "simple, inexpensive, ingenious, and insightful experiments".

In addition to sailing on Long Island Sound, he voyaged north along the Canadian coast, south to Bermuda, and even across the Atlantic several times with a small crew of family and friends.

[9] Chris Anfinsen, Richards's friend and his colleague as editors of Advances in Protein Chemistry[9] and who recommended the Carlsberg Lab to him,[6] was also an avid sailor, and they sometimes joined forces.

[9] Wendell Lim wrote that, "a dedicated sailor since childhood, Fred almost always took a month off each summer to captain a major sailing excursion, returning to lab afterwards refreshed and ready to work.

"[7] Richards lived in Guilford, Connecticut, a coastal town about 10 miles east of New Haven, situated between the Metacomet Ridge and Long Island Sound.

Later, the Yale group collected more diffraction data, and in 1970 published the RNase S structure in full detail at 2.0 Å resolution (Wyckoff et al., 1970).

[5] The active site for RNA cleavage (in the groove at center front in this drawing) involves one histidine side chain from the S-peptide fragment and another from the S-protein part.

[6] This was the method of choice for building protein crystallographic models into electron density until the late 1970s, when it was superseded by molecular computer graphics programs such as Grip-75[27] and then Frodo.

[29] He provided a "correction to the Original Bibliographic Citations," complete with diagrams, for a theatrical stage technique that used selective illumination and a sheet of plate glass inclined at 45° to give an illusion of the nymph Amphitrite rising from the sea and floating in air, or of an audience volunteer dissolving to a skeleton and back again.

"[29] Richards' most enduring long-term scientific interest was in protein folding and packing, studied both experimentally and theoretically, and mostly from a geometrical perspective.

[39][40][41] In the 1970s, with a succession of students and postdocs, the lab developed a series of chemical,[42] photochemical,[43] and cross-link labels for determining the position and relationships of proteins in biological membranes (Peters & Richards 1977), including glutaraldehyde[44] and what was one of the two first general uses of the exceptionally tight interaction of biotin with avidin,[6] anchored to ferritin for use in electron microscopy.

[53] Richards was known as a highly valued mentor and friend to students, faculty, and colleagues, including a very supportive approach to women and African–Americans, according to Norma Allewell, quoted in a remembrance by Jim Staros.

[9] For instance, in the late 1980s, he was the primary author, and the first of many signers, of a widely circulated letter that successfully urged a policy of depositing 3D atomic coordinates on scientific journals, on the NIH, and on individual crystallographers.