Page 27 - 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

list of a single black university institution – apart from the anomalous Natal University
Medical School – is as telling.
29

Table 1: Percentage of MRC funding for main external research units at universities
and associated institutions (average 1979–84)

UCT 27
Stellenbosch 21
Witwatersrand/SAIMR 18

Pretoria 12
Potchefstroom 10
Natal 6
OFS 3

Source: A. J. Brink, Gehalte is ons strewe: ’n Afskeidswoord (n.p., 1983?), p. 27, Table 6.

The MRC’s core business: Research

The choice of which applications for new research institutes, centres, units and groups
to support or existing ones to renew also speaks volumes about the MRC’s priorities
in its first decade and a half. Among the 34 to which it gave the green light, most
fell roughly into one of four categories, viz. those which focused on specific health
conditions found among whites; those focusing on diseases and conditions found
particularly among blacks; those which concentrated on conditions occurring across
the racial spectrum and which, almost inevitably in apartheid South Africa, became in
many cases the subject of comparative racial studies; and those which were essentially
of a blue-sky character.
Such one-dimensional categories, of course, risk reductionism and crude
oversimplification, for research entities were rarely single-issue bodies, especially once
their research began to branch out into greater complexity, while researchers were not
a homogeneous collection of scientists employed just to serve the interests of the state.
However, highlighting the original justification that saw the research entities funded
by the MRC does make it easier to discern the underlying concerns which prompted
the Council to fund them in the first place.
Given the pre-eminent position occupied by white men – in particular, Afrikaners
– in apartheid South Africa, it is not surprising that cardiovascular diseases afflicting
them should have ranked very high on the MRC’s agenda as the gravity of the problem

20