Sir Stanley Peart FRS in interview with Dr Ita Askonas FRS: Interview 3

In this third interview, Sir Stanley Peart discusses with immunologist, Dr Brigitte Askonas, the shared experience of working at the National Institute for Medical Resarch, Mill Hill in the early 1950s, and his subsequent appointment as senior lecturer and then professor of medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School. At the start of the interview, Sir Stanley talks of moving from St Mary's to Mill Hill, at the suggestion of George Pickering, the professor of medicine, to continue his work on the purification of hypertensin, later named angiotensin. (An account of the partial purification of angiotensin is given in Interview II.) Sir Stanley speaks of working in the laboratory of Rodney Porter - who was engaged at that time in a separation of gamma globulin - and he outlines the techniques he used to achieve a purification of angiotensin, and to determine the molar ratios of the amino acids in the peptide. During this period he maintained an association with the Medical Unit at St Mary's and in 1954 he returned there as a senior lecturer to resume a career in clinical practice combined with research. Sir Stanley speaks of a successful collaboration with Don Elliott resulting in the determination of the amino acid sequence in angiotensin, which was published in Nature in 1956. In the following section of the interview Sir Stanley and Dr Askonas discuss the distinguished scientists working at Mill Hill during the 1950s, including: the director, Sir Charles Harington, Archer Martin, Rodney Porter, Albert Neuberger, John Humphrey, Helen Muir, Wilhelm Feldberg, Alan Parkes, Audrey Smith and John Cornforth. The interview then moves to Sir Stanley's appointment to the chair of medicine at St Mary's in 1956, at the age of thirty-three, as successor to George Pickering, who became regius professor of medicine in Oxford. Sir Stanley then gives a brief history of medical units in Britain and the establishment of the Medical Unit at St Mary's by Charles Wilson, Lord Moran, with Frederick Langmead as the first professor. In the final part of the interview, Sir Stanley speaks of appointing James Robertson and Jehoiada Brown to the Medical Unit, who worked on hypertension, and he mentions his own work on the isolation of renin. In conclusion, he talks of Roy Calne, Ken Owen and Ian Kenyon, of the Surgical Unit, and Ken Porter and James Mowbray of the Medical Unit, and their involvement in a programme of cadaveric renal transplantation