Page 106 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Slimmer, but Not Lacking Gray Matter: The MRC, 2012–2021

Gray and the reborn MRC

Glenda Gray, the first female president of the MRC, was a Witwatersrand University-
trained paediatrician. Her experience of HIV+ newborns and their mothers in the
wards of Baragwanath Hospital in the 1990s had steered her into research and the
establishment of the Perinatal HIV Clinic there and then an MRC research unit to
try to find ways to counter mother-to-child-transmission. This convinced her that
research is ‘a powerful tool and you can use it to achieve your objectives’, a belief
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which emboldened her to push for the adoption of antiretroviral therapy (ARVT) at
a time when Mbeki’s government was unwilling to approve this. This opposition to
what medical science was telling her only fuelled her pro-ARVT lobbying and led her,
as a member of the Treatment Action Campaign, to the clandestine administration of
ARVT. ‘I love how science can improve and change lives’, she declared.
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In April 2014 the MRC thus gained as its ninth president a 52-year-old clinician-
researcher with a considerable track record as an activist in the interests of science.
Now headed by this ‘dynamo’ who led from the front and who was ‘not intimidated
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by authority and good at public relations’ – ‘I’ve got a big mouth and I’m provocative
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and controversial’, she once admitted – the remodelled MRC waited with no little
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trepidation to see how she would lead it, and where.
Characteristically, it did not take Gray long to initiate changes to the MRC’s self-
branding as she was certain that a revitalized Council urgently needed a new public
image, even though many on the staff were angered by her unilateral action. A design
team overhauled the existing logo to emphasize that good health was best attainable
through science, added the complementing pay-off line, ‘Advancing life’ (as it ‘defines
the work of the organisation’ ) and, at the same time, spelt out three desirable values
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to which the reborn Council announced it would be bound, viz. that it would be
pioneering, collaborative and excellent.
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More concrete in its effect was Gray’s earnest belief in the urgent need to
transform the skewed racial and gender make-up of the staff. ‘The demographics were
terrible’, she pointed out with regard to, for example, the award of MRC research
grants. ‘We were funding white men at Ivy League universities.’ To alter this, what she
termed ‘an aggressive strategy’ was needed, and to this she committed herself as ‘my
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predecessors had not fully tackled transformation and capacity development’. ‘We
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are committed to transformation.’
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To this end, the MRC’s existing loose guidelines for transformation were at
her behest given a firmer form, which spelt out equity targets, timelines to achieve
these, and implementation strategies. Intern and mentorship programmes to groom

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