Page 21 - 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

The organizational structure which Brink and his like-minded circle fashioned to
address these diverse health problems drew on the example of the British MRC, which
had been in existence since 1920 and with which Brink himself was familiar through
his two years at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith in London
in 1951–2.
Following its hybrid model, the South African MRC pursued a dual mode of
fostering medical research. Initially, the bulk of the research it supported financially
was undertaken by extramural research units, research groups and short-term
researchers in receipt of MRC grants or student bursaries to create a new cohort
of researchers. Almost all were based at the country’s universities rather than at a
single complex of laboratories housed on the MRC campus in Parow. This was aimed
at ensuring that researchers could draw on promising postgraduate students while
remaining in close contact with academic environments whose intellectual stimulus
was regarded as essential to good research. Supporting research in external units in
this way ‘promises to give maximum effect with the available manpower’, explained
Brink, so that ‘exceptional research highlights’ could be secured despite the relatively
limited funds and research staff. These units had the potential to become the MRC’s
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‘main source of top quality research manpower, new ideas and knowledge, and [to]
form the life blood of the future’, enthused a senior administrator. 14
Funding for all three research entities was for three to five years but might be
renewed once if a first-rate research record merited this. This occurred most often in
the case of research units led by academics of high standing around whom the unit had
been constructed, or research groups still building up a profile.
In 1969 there were 26 of these external research units and groups in existence, but
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in the next decade and a half almost all came to an end when their allocated lifespans
expired or their directors retired or left the country. Thus, by 1985 only 2 of the original
research units and groups remained in operation among the 29 then in service, the
Dental Research Unit and the Iron and Red Cell Metabolism Unit at the University
of the Witwatersrand (both of which were sui generis and so enjoyed extended lives),
while a third, the TB Research Unit, had been upgraded into a permanent research
institute. The rest had all been awarded MRC support for fixed periods since 1969 and
then replaced by new groups with new research foci, a mark of the Council’s keenness
to prove that it was keeping abreast of new lines of medical research.
The research institute status which the TB Research Institute gained in 1976 was
reserved for that other component of the MRC’s dual mode of supporting research:
internal institutes or centres conducting research on major health-related issues of
national importance, which could not be located at just one university or, conversely,

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