William Stanley Peart

Sir William Stanley Peart FMedSci FRS (born 31 March 1922) is a British doctor and clinical researcher who was first to demonstrate the release of noradrenaline after the stimulation of sympathetic nerves.

Peart was educated at Bradford Grammar School and St Mary's Hospital Medical School (now part of Imperial College School of Medicine).

Peart's main research interest lay in renal medicine and in particular, a hormone system that regulates blood pressure and water called the renin–angiotensin system.

He was the first to purify the peptide hormone angiotensin and determine its structure. He later isolated the enzyme renin — which catalyses the production of angiotensin — and carried out work to investigate the control of its release in the body. Peart is also acknowledged as being the driving force behind the development of the renal transplant programme at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London.

Peart was Chair of the Medical Research Society for more than a decade and later a member of the Medical Research Council. He was also a trustee of the Wellcome Trust, where he headed their first clinical panel.

Peart was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1969. He was knighted in 1985. He was awarded the Buchanan Medal of the Royal Society in 2000 "for his contribution to the foundations of understanding of the renin angiotensin system in particular through his seminal work on the isolation and determination of the structure of angiotensin, purification of renin, and subsequent studies on the control of renin release".