Page 25 - 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

TB or not TB? At the
MRC TB Research Unit at
Onderstepoort in 1974 a blood
specimen is drawn to be tested
for TB.

On paper in this hierarchical, white Afrikaner, male-dominated structure, the
president answered to the MRC Council, but, as Brink was also its chairman, he held
complete sway. ‘There was a very clear chain of command,’ recalled a long-serving
staffer wryly. ‘What the president said, went.’ One of his successors described it
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under him as ‘a follow-the-leader-without-questioning type of institution … highly
organised, almost regimented, like an army’, in which everyone ‘knew their place and
location within the hierarchy’. 21
Brink’s authoritarian style and conservative values permeated the MRC. One
newcomer remarked that its uniformly grey buildings ‘completely summed up the
… institutional atmosphere’. Obedience to decisions from above was the norm,
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Brink himself even being prepared to remove those who openly dissented. In the
most high-profile example of this, in 1987 he successfully went as far as the Supreme
Court to ensure the dismissal of the director of the Research Institute for Nutritional
Diseases (RIND), Dr Jacques Rossouw, for the latter’s wish to acknowledge non-MRC
collaborators in the Coronary Risk Factor Study project and for sharing his criticism
of Brink’s plan to break up the RIND with the Minister of Health.
Not that any of those appointed to the Council by the Minister of Health held views
radically opposed to Brink’s line or were inclined to rock his boat. Until 1979 all were
white men from the ranks of academic medicine, medical administration and law and

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