Page 129 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

explained. ‘You belong to this “brotherhood” … You basically find yourself … operating
with them at an international level, so that helps the stature of the organisation.’ 89
Beneficial though such joint partnerships undoubtedly were, this variant of
‘parachute research’ did come with the possibility of disproportionate influence on the
choice and design of the research project by the major funder. This was particularly
the case when the MRC was headed by interim or pliant presidents between 2002
and 2012 and while it was still diffident about its standing on the world stage, which
made it keen to co-operate with what metropolitan medical science wanted, almost in
a neo-colonial relationship. In these years it was more ‘a sing for your supper kind of
thing’, admitted one long-time administrator. ‘Rightfully or wrongfully, we followed
the agenda of the funding agencies.’ Or, to use another idiom, he who paid the piper
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called the tune. With regret, a unit director lamented that in these years the MRC was
‘an instrument in someone else’s big project, an important instrument but always an
instrument rather than an initiator’.
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Yet, beginning with Karim’s insistence in 2013 on the priority of South Africa’s
top ten killers as research topics and Gray’s determination when she became president
a year later that the MRC should have an equal say in joint projects in which it
participated, the previous one-sidedness began to wane. ‘We’re taking them into
certain things that they’re not skilled in and they’re taking us into areas [that we’re
not skilled in]’, explained one unit director in justification. Gray was adamant that
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the MRC should put money into every joint project ‘so that whatever we do, we have
a voice or agency [in it] … We only fund the topics we think important … We’re
grounded in the health problems of our country … We do try and bring back the locus
of control into South Africa.’ Where this was not possible, she was willing to turn
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down proposals for such projects so as to ensure that the MRC’s declared priorities
were upheld. ‘You know what, we’re out of this relationship’, she bluntly told one
would-be partner which wanted to work with the MRC on a topic deemed less than
a high priority in South Africa. Taking up such a position, she reflected with pride,
meant ‘We punch above our weight-class. We’ve got lots of chutzpah.’
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That the MRC was regaining its reputation for high-quality scientific research after
faltering in this for almost ten years from 2002 is equally apparent in the keenness of
both the private and public sectors to work with it in developing and commercializing
discoveries and devices made in research units which it supported, in other words in
translating its research from the laboratory to the marketplace. This was evident, for
example, in 2014 when the international health enhancer PATH joined the MRC in
setting up the Global Health Innovation Accelerator to target gaps in and barriers to
health innovation in South Africa. PATH chose the MRC for this partnership, it said,

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