Page 34 - 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

‘Other complicating factors were the particular circumstances and unfavourable
climate surrounding the planned meeting in the USA.’ 41
When an investigative British journalist queried this explanation and suggested
instead that the MRC’s veto was the result of pressure from the mine owners – he later
labelled the MRC ‘a limp appendage of the mining industry’ – Brink was indignant,
42
denying this energetically and defending the MRC as ‘an organisation founded with
noble objectives similar to those of the British MRC and with a proud record of
achievement and impartiality. The statement [by the journalist] could only have been
inspired by a prejudicial attitude.’ Dismayed, the two authors reviewed their findings
43
and supplemented them with further research, but it was not until 1986 that their
revised version was published. By then, one of them had left the MRC for Australia
44
and the other was preparing to move to England.
Not that this experience made the MRC hesitant to exercise its censoring hand
again. In 1979 it refused permission for a socio-economic profile of South Africa’s

An MRC-supported Human Biochemistry Research Unit researcher at the South African
Institute for Medical Research measuring African schoolchildren in 1972 for knock knees
and bow legs which were signs of rickets. The Unit declared that its aim was to ‘throw more
light on conditions and diseases due to nutritional deficiency or excess, in respect of dietary
pattern, biochemistry, metabolism, etc, with particular reference to contrasting situations in
interracial populations’. To its surprise it concluded that ‘The prevalence of bowed legs and
knock knees in racial groups shows little variability’.

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