Page 36 - 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

and bowel behaviour. With surprise, in regard to the latter two, it concluded that
‘A significant proportion of urban Black adults have approximately the same bowel
behaviour and faeces composition when compared with those of White adults’.
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Apparently less coloured by racial typologies was the research undertaken by
the fourth category of research entities, those primarily engaged in basic, blue-sky
laboratory research aimed at elucidating physiological, biochemical and molecular
processes at the heart of living matter. They constituted almost two-thirds of the new
research bodies which the MRC chose to fund between 1969 and 1985, suggesting
perhaps a greater affinity on its part for this type of research rather than for public
health-oriented projects, which were then attracting great enthusiasm globally in the
wake of the Alma Ata Declaration’s goal of ‘Health for All’ (1978). South Africa was
not a signatory to this declaration because it had withdrawn from the World Health
Organization (WHO) ‘furiously’ 14 years earlier, after the United Nations had
condemned its policy of apartheid. Since then this policy had caused its links with
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the international scientific community – except with similarly unwelcome Israelis and
Taiwanese – to shrink appreciably.
The laboratory-based or blue-sky research bodies which the MRC did support were
of two kinds. The Institute for Biostatistics, the Institute for Electron Microscopy, the
Institute for Medical Literature, and the Accelerator Applications in Medical Research
Institute were all support bodies within the MRC, founded primarily to provide
highly specialized services and equipment for medical researchers in smaller research
units and groups. For instance, the Institute for Medical Literature offered up-to-
date journal citations and bibliographies by means of the then novel computer-based
MEDLINE system, a first in South Africa, while the Institute for Biostatistics advised
researchers new to projects involving the use of computers, statistics, surveys, trials
and modelling. For its part, the Accelerator Applications Institute and its cyclotron
added a whole new dimension to the work of researchers into radiobiology and nuclear
magnetic resonance imaging.
The second category of blue-sky research was done in research institutes, units
and groups across the board, at entities within the MRC itself, at university medical
schools and at the SAIMR. Some, like the MRC Research Institute for Nutritional
Diseases, the MRC–UCT Protein Research Unit, the MRC–UCT Virus Research
Unit and the MRC–Stellenbosch Iodine Metabolism Research Unit, had been
established under the CSIR before 1969 and were readily renewed by the MRC in
the light of their impressive research track-records, as in the case of the Institute for
Nutritional Diseases’ pioneering work in compiling the first scientifically based food
composition tables for South Africa. Others, like the MRC–UOFS Experimental

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