Page 29 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID
P. 29
A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid
Having a heart-to-heart discussion. The senior researcher at the new MRC-UCT Ischaemic
Heart Disease Research Unit, Dr Lionel Opie (left), and Professor Andries Brink study an
experiment using a rat’s heart, 1976.
A third example of MRC intervention in the interests of the health of whites is
evident in the financial backing it gave to the Oligophrenia Research Group at the
Witrand Mental Institution in Potchefstroom. From 1970 it generously paid 80 per
cent of the salaries of the director and his assistants who were conducting research into
mental deficiency among the Institution’s large number of white inmates in particular.
Not inaccurately, the now-permanent director hailed this as ‘a new phase’ in the
research group’s history.
36
The same sensitivity to the needs of whites’ health underlay the MRC’s support
for the upgrading to full research unit status in 1973 of another research group which
it funded, the Photobiology Research Group at Pretoria University. Not only did it
22
