Victor Percy Whittaker (11 June 1919 – 5 July 2016) was a British biochemist who pioneered studies on the subcellular fractionation of the brain.

In 1960 he discovered that the application of mild liquid shear to brain tissue detached presynaptic nerve terminals from their axons and allowed them to be isolated as sealed structures by the combination of differential and density gradient centrifugation.

[6][7][8] Synaptosomes have been widely used for the in vitro biochemical analysis of presynaptic function and as a test preparation in pharmaceutical industry, providing the basis of thousands of publications on the biochemistry of synaptic transmission.

Using osmotic shock he subsequently showed that intact synaptic vesicles of high purity can be isolated by density gradient centrifugation from lysed synaptosomes.

[9][10] Based on earlier work it had been hypothesized that the small electron-lucent vesicles observed by electron microscopy in cholinergic nerve terminals contained and released quantal packages of the neurotransmitter.