Page 102 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Chapter Five

Slimmer, but Not Lacking Gray Matter:

The MRC, 2012–2021

o turn the MRC around from its state of dire disarray in 2012 demanded
drastic action, and this is what the new Minister of Health, Dr Aaron
TMotsoaledi, required of the two people whom he recommended as presidents
of the MRC in these years, Professor Salim Abdool ‘Slim’ Karim in 2012 and Professor
Glenda Gray in 2014. Using, respectively, a scalpel and a snaffle with well-targeted
determination, the two dynamic medical scientists first arrested its decline and then
set it on an upward path again, towards a second regeneration. This produced ‘a feeling
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of new life in the organization’, admitted one MRC veteran. So significant were their
respective initiatives in this direction that this chapter’s title expressly alludes to them,
if in a slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion.

Slimming down

‘Slim’ Karim, a 52-year-old infectious diseases epidemiologist, had headed CERSA
between 1993 and 2001 from his base in Durban, where he strongly opposed Mbeki’s
AIDS denialism before founding the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in
South Africa (CAPRISA) there in 2002. Requested by his old medical school classmate
Motsoaledi to step into the MRC’s presidency to try to steer the institution out of its
‘deep trouble … in the doldrums’ because its Board had been unable to find a suitable
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appointee, he agreed, on the proviso that his term of office would not exceed two years.
In the end, he occupied the position for only 18 months.

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