Page 12 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

From Genesis to Exodus: The Founding of the MRC, 1969–1970

Research in Medical Sciences (CRMS), gave it a broader brief, a full-time chair to
drive it, and a direct line to the president of the CSIR for advice on funding research.
Strongly supported by the CSIR, the CRMS quickly gained stature as the country’s
most influential key to medical research funding. By 1965, 24 research units were being
funded by the CSIR on the CRMS’s specific recommendation as the latter enjoyed a
harmonious relationship with its parent body. A proposal that it should separate from
the CSIR to form an autonomous medical research council it turned down with but
one dissentient.
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Yet the Government had a grander plan in mind for CRMS than that it should
remain just an advisory body to the CSIR on funding. Attracted, as the economy
boomed, by the vision of creating a scientifically driven South Africa in which high-
tech medicine loomed large, it envisaged the establishment of a national science park
around the CSIR’s headquarters at its appropriately named ‘Scientia’ site on the fringe
of Pretoria. Clustered around it would be the homes of the country’s major science
institutions, thereby creating what would become the ‘scientific centre’ of the new
Republic of South Africa, what the responsible Cabinet minister, Dr Carel de Wet,
enthusiastically described as ‘a complex of highly specialized laboratories which can
carry out research of the best quality’. Proudly the CSIR declared that ‘South Africa
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has taken its place among the scientifically oriented countries of the world’. 8
In this scientific crown medical research should be a jewel, the Government
believed, and so it began to push for the CRMS to be upgraded into a fully fledged,
independent medical research institution in its own right. The Prime Minister’s Chief
Scientific Adviser, Dr H. O. Mönnig, argued that medical research did not fit easily
with the other disciplines within the CSIR, that decisions about medical research
funding should be taken solely by medical scientists without the need for the CSIR’s
approval, and that leaving medical research to the Department of Public Health instead
would inhibit such research, as doing this would turn researchers into civil servants
who would certainly be frustrated by a chafing civil service culture of red tape and
bureaucrat-bound regulation.
To these arguments the world’s first heart transplant by Professor Christiaan
Barnard and his team at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital in December 1967 only
added weight. How could the research behind such medical breakthroughs ultimately
depend on the approval of funding by a non-medical body like the CSIR? Given the
status and prestige of medicine locally, ‘the time is now ripe, I almost want to say over-
ripe, for the creation of a separate Medical Research Council’, insisted De Wet. ‘At this
stage, where we stand in the forefront as far as medical science is concerned, we will
get our own separate MRC.’
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