Page 13 - 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

On this wave of ardour for medical research – itself part of the government’s wider
scheme to advance scientific research generally – the MRC came into being as an
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autonomous medical science research council on 1 July 1969, in terms of the South
African Medical Research Council Act (Act 19 of 1969). Thereby, South Africa at last
joined the list of countries in both the Global North and South possessing dedicated,
independent medical research institutions.
At its birth, the MRC took over responsibility for funding from its own budget
26 research units and groups, most of them previously funded and monitored by
the CSIR. A 27th, the National Institute for Nutritional Diseases, was placed under
the MRC’s financial authority too, despite its protests that its research had more in
common with the CSIR’s basic sciences and technology units than with medical or
clinical sciences. To meet it halfway, when it became clear that the first president of the
MRC, the 46-year-old Professor Andries Brink, would fill this position on a part-time
basis only, the Nutritional Diseases Institute’s director, Dr J. J. Theron, was appointed
as the Council’s full-time vice-president and CEO.
This meant that, until the MRC moved its headquarters to Parow near Cape Town
in December 1970, Brink spent two days per fortnight at the MRC’s provisional offices
at ‘Scientia’, before returning to Stellenbosch University, where he had been the
professor of internal medicine since 1956. Not that this double appointment in cities
1,450 km apart meant that he did either job by halves. A decorous and determined
workaholic – ‘procrastination is the thief of time’ was his motto – he ran the MRC
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from the top ‘with a rod of iron’ (as a member of the MRC board put it), and sought
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to ensure that at all times its operation accorded with what he deemed to be the highest
‘professional and academic norms and values’, which he so cherished. A later MRC
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president who briefly worked at the MRC in Brink’s time described him as ‘a steely
authoritarian’ who ruled the institution ‘like an oligarch’. 14
Committed to building up the MRC into the country’s pre-eminent institution
for medical research by drawing researchers ‘who would make a difference’ and then
keeping them there by looking after their research needs well, Brink brooked no
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intervention on his turf by the Department of Public Health. If this meant that he had
to seek support from the prime minister at this time, John Vorster, a private patient of
his, he did not refrain from doing so. More than once, having consulted Vorster about
an objection to a decision by the MRC, he felt emboldened to tell the Department of
Public Health ‘to butt out’, recalled a close confidante of his.
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Brink himself was a cardiologist who was active in cardiovascular research in his
CSIR-supported research unit at Stellenbosch until his demanding administrative
burden made it difficult for him to continue this work at the same high level which he

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