Page 152 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Conclusion

s the preceding chapters have shown, from even before the MRC’s inception
in 1969 its history was not without serious crisis or controversy, for instance
Aits contested creation, its ongoing friction with the national Department of
Health, the costly collapse of its Medtech initiative, its head-to-head clashes with
AIDS denialists in and out of government, and the acute financial, administrative,
research and staff transformation issues which it faced after 1994, epitomized by the
harrowing revitalization project. Twice it had in effect to be reborn as it recovered
from these confrontations, the second rebirth confirmed by the strong leadership it
provided in response to the crisis posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yet, notwithstanding these challenges, the MRC’s course since its establishment
has been of a widening scope on all fronts – for instance, expanding the narrowly
biomedical range of the research it initially supported to embrace public health too;
increasing the size and diversity in racial and gender terms of its staff and researchers-
in-training; ensuring that its research results informed policy-making and health
practice locally and nationally; seeking out wider sources of research funding beyond
just the state to include, extensively, the private sector too; and broadening the
platforms for medical research in the country by deliberately fostering such research
at historically black universities. Increasingly such initiatives targeted the health
problems of a wider proportion of the population than mainly the white minority, who
had formed the primary focus of MRC-supported research in its early years. All of this
meant that, decade by decade, research supported by the MRC benefited the health
of more and more of the population. As it widened its lenses in these ways, its stature
grew locally and abroad. As it itself, the health landscape and the country changed, so

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