Page 22 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Aanmatiging (Self-Assertion): The MRC, 1969–1985

were replicated at several. It was as one of these, for example, that the reluctant
National Institute for Nutritional Diseases was brought into the MRC in 1969, to
be followed over the next 16 years by research institutes for occupational diseases,
biostatistics, electron microscopy, medical literature, tropical diseases, nuclear
accelerator applications and medical biophysics. Staffed and entirely funded by the
MRC – paradoxically from the same budget as external research units, thereby creating
a potential conflict of interests in its funding of research – and pushed by Brink
to emulate the intensive research ethos of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
where he had spent a year, these institutes in effect constituted an internal research
arm, but with each concentrating tightly on its own research field and interacting
little with those outside its particular silo. A critic within the MRC judged them to be
‘intellectually isolated from each other and often intellectually isolated within their
own subprogramme structure’. Six of the nine were housed on or near its Parow
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campus, although accommodation there was very tight until 1977, when the new,
computer-linked Stemlit (Statistics, Electron Microscopy and Literature) Building
was opened. The other three institutes were in Onderstepoort and then Pretoria
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(Research Institute for TB), Johannesburg (National Institute for Occupational
Diseases) and Durban (Research Institute for Diseases in a Tropical Environment).
All, however, were open to non-MRC researchers whose home institutions lacked the
dedicated resources available at these institutes. Intended to be permanent, they were
envisaged as being national centres of specialized skills, services and equipment in
their particular fields. As such, they also gave the MRC a fixed presence beyond the
Cape Peninsula, in the Transvaal and Natal.
Presiding over this array of research entities was the first president of the MRC,
Professor Andries Brink (1969–88), who was appointed by the Minister of Health,
Dr Carel de Wet. He was advised by an executive committee consisting of four
members of the MRC Council, who also kept an eye on the researchers on the ground,
with whom they maintained regular contact. Among them, as elsewhere within the
MRC, white Afrikaners predominated, whether as researchers or administrators.
This gave the campus a strongly Afrikaans ethos – from the language spoken in the
whites-only tearooms to the monthly ‘koekdag’ (cake day) and the annual Christmas
party held for the residents of a nearby Afrikaner old-age home. ‘You felt you were
part of a family’, recalled one Afrikaner member of staff fondly. The only blacks on
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the staff until the mid-1980s were manual workers who, in keeping with apartheid
policy, were not permitted to share any recreational or toilet facilities with whites.
Indeed, one of the first black professionals to join the MRC in 1986 found that ‘the
phone books were still categorised according to race’.
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