Page 153 - 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

it contributed to changing health conditions in South Africa for the better.
Within this changing framework, research by a number of its intra- and extramural
research units stands out as especially game-changing and decisive. This ranged
over an array of fields from, for example, the prophylactic (e.g. the vaccines against
the rotavirus, childhood pneumonia and meningitis, CORIS and Lubombo malaria
programme) to the policy-shaping (e.g. on tobacco control, unleaded petrol, GBV and
reduction of sugary drink consumption), from the educative (the schools outreach
programme) to the technological (the Umbiflow device) and the clinical (Cochrane
Centre Research Unit trials, and maternity and infant care in hospital), from the
informational (SACENDU and drug use) to the basic (genome project) and the
statistical (registration, collection and analysis of mortality statistics countrywide). In
short, the MRC has long punched above its weight despite its sometimes fluctuating
health as an organization.
Encapsulating this change in the nature and raison d’être of the MRC over five
decades are the changes in the institution’s motto in this period. This widening is most
obviously seen and tracked in the way in which it defined and redefined its mission
four times in its history. The Latin tag ‘Scire volumus’ (‘We wish to know’), adopted in
1970, speaks to its exclusivity, its belief in the justification of undertaking research for
its own sake, and its wish to place itself within this classic scientific tradition. Nineteen
years later, in 1989, the MRC replaced the inward-looking ‘Scire volumus’ with the
wider, more outwardly aware goal of ‘Shaping a healthy future’, which, as the more
inclusive new South Africa approached, was succeeded in 1993 by the more politically
attuned ‘Building a healthy nation through research’. In post-1994, democratic
South Africa a commitment to recognizing the health needs of the whole population,
especially its underclasses, was required. In 2014 this produced the more socially
aware ‘To advance the nation’s health and quality of life and address inequality’, an
indication that it recognized its more widely conceived role as one focusing far more
on the health of the majority of the population.
In the light of such ongoing changes in the nature of the MRC itself, the health
context in which it functioned, and its conception of its mission during its first fifty
years, one may well speculate as to what its motto will be when it turns seventy-five in
2044.
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