Edward George Gray (1924–1999) was a British anatomist and neuroscientist who pioneered the investigation of neural tissues with transmission electron microscopy.
During his professional career, Gray made a number of profound contributions to our knowledge of synaptic structure.
[1] To this day, synapses are classified according to their ultrastructure as Gray type 1 (asymmetric) or type 2 (symmetric), corresponding to inhibitory and excitatory synapses.
Edward G. Gray came to the Anatomy Department at University College London (UCL) in 1955 to work as a postdoctoral assistant to John Z.
In 1959, he published a seminal paper on the synaptic structure in mammalian neocortex, describing a specialized organelle inside dendritic spines that he named the spine apparatus.