Page 10 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Chapter One

From Genesis to Exodus: The Founding

of the MRC, 1969–1970

nstitutions have been central to medical research in modern times because of the
resources and funds which they command and because of the collective nature of
Isuch research, particularly since the germ revolution. The South African Medical
Research Council (MRC) is such an institution, formally created in 1969, decades after
analogous institutions in Brazil, India, Great Britain, the United States and Australia,
but with identifiable scientific roots going back to fledgling institutions established in
southern Africa nearly eighty years before this.
Founded as the germ revolution gathered pace in the late 19th century in Europe,
in southern Africa such early institutions – like the Colonial Bacteriological Institute
(1891) in the Cape Colony and the Government Chemical and Bacteriological
Laboratories (1902) in the Transvaal Colony – consequently focused exclusively on
bacteriological research. However, as the scope for medical research widened in the
early 20th century, they were followed by the more extensive South African Institute
for Medical Research (1912), which was jointly funded by the new Union Government
and the mining industry to focus on miners’ health and, more generally, ‘the prevention
and treatment of human disease’, by pockets of research under the aegis of the
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Department of Public Health (1919) and the country’s first two medical schools at
the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits)
from the 1920s and even briefly by an embryonic community-oriented primary care

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