Page 38 - 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

‘Albinism in South Africa: Why so common in blacks?’ was the title of an article in the
South African Journal of Science in 1987. The author, Dr J.G.R. Kromberg, was a
researcher in the MRC-supported Human Ecogenetics Research Unit at the South African
Institute for Medical Research in Johannesburg. One of its ongoing projects was a study
of albinism in South Africa, part of its investigation into the ways in which this genetic
variation influenced susceptibility to environmental agents. Here a Transkeian woman with
albinism has her visual acuity tested.

inherited skeletal disorders and cytogenetics. To Brink, backing such state-of-the-art
research was not only further proof of the MRC’s leadership of medical research in
the country, but also confirmation of his own belief in inherent racial differences. The
ultimate aim of such research, he opined, was ‘to correlate as many genetic variations
as possible with specific diseases or the susceptibility to specific diseases’. That one
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of the extremely rare diseases studied, sclerosteosis, was confined to a small number of
Afrikaners again reflects the MRC’s priorities.
For all such racially skewed choices about suitable research areas and pre-
conceptions that race and not socio-economic environment was the prime determinant
of differences, in its first decade and a half the MRC did succeed in cementing its
primacy in the country’s medical research field. To achieve this, it had fashioned
itself into a structure which directly or indirectly pursued such research with vigour,

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