Paul Gray
 
Career History.
 
            Paul Gray was born in Wolverhampton in 1932, the only child of Frederick and Vera Gray.  He was educated at St. Chad's College Wolverhampton where he gained a scholarship to Birmingham University graduating in 1954 with an honours BSc in Chemistry.  He was then for several years chief works chemist at Midland Tar Distillers Oldbury before being appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at Wolverhampton College of Advanced Technology (now Wolverhampton University) where he carried out research for the Ministry of Power on high temperature corrosion and deposition in gas turbines, presented to Birmingham University for an external MSc in materials science in 1960.
 
            In 1959 he was appointed head of the reactor chemistry division at the Winfrith Heath Establishment of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and in 1961 was seconded to the international OECD Dragon Reactor Project firstly as head of the operations chemistry division.  He was then appointed reactor operations controller with executive responsibility for the team commissioning and operating the world's first High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor (HTGCR).  This reactor was a novel design operating at core temperatures of up to 1,400 C with a non fission product releasing ceramic composite fuel.  Following the commissioning of the reactor, he was also extensively involved in work in reactor development and experimental work in Europe, published a large number of reports and scientific papers on nuclear reactor science and technology and registered several patents for instruments for the analysis of very low level gaseous impurities in helium.
 
            When Britain joined the European Community in 1973 he was appointed to the Commission of the European Communities as deputy head of division for the Elimination of Technical Barriers to Trade in the Directorate General for the Internal Market.  In 1974 he negotiated in the Council the adoption of the first EC directive on fertilisers, which had been under discussion for 14 years, and in 1975 the adoption of the first European legislation on cosmetics, which required all products used in cosmetics to be safe.  He also drafted and negotiated the EC directive requiring all new chemicals to be tested for safety and registered before sale.  In 1975 he was one of a small Commission team who negotiated in the Council a package of 19 directives on the safety of industrial products.  This was complex because of the unanimity rule which then prevailed in the EC Council of Ministers for Article 100 directives.
 
            In 1977 he was appointed as head of division for paper, wood, leather, footwear and miscellaneous industries.  His division developed policies for the restructuring of these industries which involved seeking temporary protection within the constraints of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) whilst improving the competitivity of Community industry.  On the external policy front, whilst seeking to negotiate 'self restraint' agreements with newly industrialised countries such as Korea and Taiwan, it was necessary through the GATT to resist protection in the EC's major export markets in the USA and Canada.
 
            The 1973 EFTA/EEC agreements instituted diminution of the tariff protection for the EC paper industry over a period of ten years with the possibility of reintroduction of full duty in the case of economic damage to the EC industry.  In addition, an annual EC duty-free newsprint quota was set in such a way as to maintain the competitive position of the Community industry whilst preserving the right of the British press to newsprint at world price once  Community supplies had been exhausted
 
            Considerations of competition policy were an essential element of this system and he was involved with the industrial policy aspects of the EC review of the aid given by Mrs Thatcher's government to the modernisation of the Bowater newsprint mill in Ellesmere Port which enabled its purchase and reopening by the Canadian company Consolidated Bathurst.  The UK newsprint industry went through a period of crisis and re-expansion on a sounder industrial base under the influence of the economic pressures brought about by the EFTA agreements and the quota.   He was also chairman of the EC/Canada working party on forest industries established under the EC/Canada agreement on industrial cooperation.
 
            Another aspect of the work of the division was related to the better use of natural resources and the protection of endangered species.  Contrary to popular belief European forests are suffering from an under-utilisation of pulpwood for paper, which is composed mainly of forest thinnings. Without thinning the forest degenerates and wood and wood based products are, after petroleum products, the most important negative component of the EC trade balance.  A policy for forest industries including the rational use of wood and forest 'waste' and recycling was therefore set in hand and now in the EC almost 50% of paper and board is made from recycled waste.
 
            Gray also developed the E.C. legislation on banning the use of  'baby seal skins' produced by the Canadian and Norwegian seal culls and the ban on the import of whale products into the E.C. which were extensively used in the tanning industry to reinforce the moratorium on whale hunting.  The Community was thus able to meet environmental concerns, whilst protecting the beleaguered EC tanning industry from unfair competition from a protected Japanese industry using whale oil as a leather treatment.
 
            In 1980 the construction industry was added to his responsibilities. This was a crucial moment in building design when, as a result of rapid increases in computing power, it became possible to replace older deterministic methods of structural design of buildings to resist various stresses, wind, fire, earthquake by probabilistic methods.  A series of European Building Codes (EUROCODES) was developed which were taken out of the framework of formal law giving entrepreneurs the option to use them if they wished.  This was one of the prototypes for the 1992 'new approach' of reference to standards.
 
            In December 1982 he was appointed head of Division for Food with responsibilities covering food law, industrial policy for the food industry, trade in processed food, European cooperative food research projects and industrial  biotechnology.  The system in trade in processed food compensates exporting food manufacturers for the high prices of the Common Agricultural Policy (C.A.P.) and by levying imports gives  import compensation.  It involved the management of an expenditure of around 650 Million ECU/year a relatively large part of this going to exports from the UK food and Drink industry.
 
            In 1983, together with staff from the biotechnology division of the directorate general for research, his department produced the Commission's first Communication on biotechnology. This laid down four topics:
 
            Research;
            Access to raw materials at world prices;
            The protection of intellectual property;
            The use of existing legislation wherever possible;
 
as main planks of Community action. He then developed and negotiated with the agricultural directorate general a proposal for the reform of the existing C.A.P. sugar and starch regimes. The previous system was discouraging the development of  biotechnology based industry in the EC.  The new regimes were adopted in 1987 and were embodied in the reform of the CAP negotiated in the G.A.T.T. Uraguay round.
 
            He made a major contribution to the reform of EC food law. Previously the EC using article 100 of the Treaty had been attempting to harmonize all national food laws.  Since many of these determined the composition of products this was  seen as a fundamental attack on national culture and the process was unsuccessful for all but a few simple products like fruit juice or honey.   A Commission Communication on food law was drafted in 1983/4 based on a careful balance between harmonization and Cassis de Dijon case law.  When Lord Cockfield was made Commissioner for the internal market in 1985 he proposed it to the Commission as  part of the 1992 programme for completion of the Internal Market. The Communication states that EC food law is to deal only with three questions which are vital to consumer interest:
 
-           the protection of public health;
-           fair trading (labelling and advertising);   and
-           the enforcement of legislation by control authorities.
 
            Composition rules were dubbed 'recipe law', and differences in national rules should  no longer hinder trade since they can be dealt with by adequate labelling.  The Commission Communication stated "...it is neither desirable nor necessary to confine the culinary riches of twelve Member States in a straitjacket of legislation...".  Concepts such as 'Euro-bread and Euro-beer' were consigned to the history books and the programme for food law revision, which was an early  example of subsidiarity, met with great success, most of the legislation proposed being adopted before the 1992 deadline.  In parallel the Commission supported and won a number of cases in the European Court such as the Beer case which allowed beer from other Member States to be sold in Germany.  In October 1989 the considerable body of food case law was analysed in a further Commission Communication that stated the conditions laid down by the Court under which food can freely circulate.
 
            A number of features of the 1990 UK Food Act, such as 'in factory inspection', and the reform of food additive laws and the subsequent simplification of hygiene rules derive directly from these EC initiatives. For the first time in 1988 and 1989 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not adopt any new food standards as a first step in taking a similar approach to the EC.  The G.A.T.T. Sanitary and Phytosanitary (S.P.S.) Code, negotiated in the Uraguay round also is inspired from this approach.  It  introduces an international dispute resolution procedure for food trade and Gray led the EC delegation to the WHO/FAO Codex Alimentarius conference in Rome in March 1991 which was called to reorient international food law to a similar approach to that of the EC.
 
            In the negotiation of the European Economic Area (E.E.A.) agreement the EFTA countries accepted existing EEC food law in its entirety and the various agreements negotiated with Central and Eastern European Countries will lead to EEC food law covering a much wider area, thus enlarging the possibilities for the Community food industry to export unhindered to the whole of the European Continent.
 
            Perhaps the most personally fulfilling of Gray's activities in the Commission was the laying down and managing of emergency legislation fixing limits for radioactive contamination in food following the Chernobyl crisis.  Since the Spanish oil contamination problem in 1979 his division had been operating an EC rapid alert system for food contamination.  In 1984/5 the Austrian diethylene glycol (so called 'antifreeze') incident occurred and a much more serious methanol contamination incident in wine in Italy which killed some 21 people.  As a result of having to handle the masses of data for these incidents a computer information recording and re-transmitting system was installed to enable the Commission to correspond with national food controllers as rapidly as possible in co-ordinating the withdrawal of contaminated foodstuffs.
 
            The availability of this system, which by then was being used for several food alerts a month, together with the fact that Gray had been trained as a nuclear incident controller on the Dragon Reactor put him in a unique position of having hour by hour information on contamination and the appropriate scientific background to propose remedial action. The Commission received a message from the Danish controller indicating nuclear fallout on crops and immediately put the rapid alert system in action to collect data.  After presiding a meeting of food controllers and nuclear experts held while the fallout was still occurring together with some colleagues he drafted proposals on temporarily blocking imports from Eastern Europe while E.C. wide limits for the radioactive contamination of food.  The proposal was adopted by the Commission the next day and the Council within the week.
 
            A subsequent proposal set permitted levels of the 'marker isotopes' Caesium 134 and Caesium 137 in food and these Regulations enabled trade in foodstuffs to continue.  During the period of crisis Gray in close daily contact with the EC Member States EFTA and Eastern Europe and EC measures were adopted by 26 other countries including the USSR.  The political analysis of this incident is described in a book published by Springer Verlag and co-written by scientists and political analysts from eastern and western European countries compiled including Gray under the auspices of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna.  The cooperation and free flow of information established with Eastern Europe and the absence information from Russian sources was a public demonstration of the inadequacies of their authoritarian system and contributed to the crumbling of 'the iron curtain'.
 
            A further important policy initiative was a proposal, made in March 1991 and adopted unanimously by the Council under the British Presidency on 22 September 1992, to establish a cooperative system for all food safety assessment in Europe.  This unites all the various bodies and institutes carrying out research and assessment of food safety problems and is headed by the Commission's Scientific Committee for Food. The system shares responsibilities according to the principle of subsidiarity and fulfils most of the tasks of a Food Agency without giving rise to problems of delegation of powers to an agency or creating a large centralised body.   It also make a more efficient use of scarce scientific resources by avoiding duplicate assessments at national level.
 
            In February 1991 Gray was appointed as an adviser to the Commission with specific responsibilities for industrial biotechnology in the directorate general for industry. His task was to develop a modified approach to the regulation of biotechnology that, whilst offering adequate protection, would stimulate the development of the industry in Europe. A Commission Communication on Promoting the Competitive Environment for Industrial Activities Based on Biotechnology in the Community was endorsed by the Council in October 1991 and a number of initiatives have been set in hand to put the policies set out in this document into effect and to bring EC biotechnology regulation onto a science based risk assessment approach.
 
            In December 1992 Gray was appointed as Director of European Union  Research programmes on Environment and Climate, and Marine Science and Technology.  New research programmes covering these themes were drafted and negotiated in 1993 and 1994 and in December 1994 the E.U. Council adopted within the fourth framework programme the specific Environment and Climate, and Marine Science and Technology Research Programmes with budgets of 570 and 244 Million ECU for the four year period 1995-1998 respectively representing increases in budget of about 6% and 100% respectively.
 
            The research programmes are mainly executed by shared cost actions by EU research institutes, universities and industry consortia. The main themes for the environment and climate programme are research into the natural environmental, pollutants, natural catastrophes (floods, earthquakes and volcanoes) environmental quality and global change; instruments and techniques for monitoring environmental parameters and processes; space techniques applied to environmental monitoring and research and the human dimensions of environmental change.  For the marine science and technology programme the principal themes are research on marine systems, extreme marine environments and regional seas; strategic research on coastal and shelf seas and coastal engineering; generic and advanced systems for marine technologies.
 
            Gray retired from the European Commission in 1996 and is currently an adviser to Prince Laurent of Belgium on Environmental Affairs, a member of Governing Board of the Belgian National Orchestra, a senior scientific adviser to the European Global Ocean Observing System, a visiting lecturer at a number of European universities and a writer and adviser on food safety questions.