Page 42 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

On and over the Brink: The MRC, 1985–1994

This marked change of perspective at the top of the MRC about the kind of medical
research which the country most needed underlay the new directions which it gradually
began to foster from the mid-1980s. Reading the writing on the wall even more clearly,
Brink’s two successors as president, the affable 58-year-old nuclear medicine specialist
Philip van Heerden (1988–92) and the prominent virologist Walter Prozesky (1993–
8) extended the scope of innovation even further and deliberately spelt out a wide
definition of the intended beneficiaries by adopting ‘Building a healthy nation through
research’ as the MRC’s new motto in 1993. As an official outline of strategy for the
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coming years put it, ‘The interest of the whole population and thus the full range of
health needs in the community have to be addressed by the MRC through research.’
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Accordingly, the MRC ‘had to examine whether the manner in which research
is practised, supported and managed is still suitable in a rapidly changing South
Africa’, Van Heerden announced momentously in 1989. Having undertaken such
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an examination as Van Heerden’s vice-president for four years, the reform-minded,
55-year-old Prozesky concluded that what was urgently needed was a ‘drastic

A first step towards changing
the MRC’s image. The
new MRC logo adopted in
1988 to signify the ‘role of
medical research and health
care in South Africa’. The
Aesculapian staff, the double
helix of DNA and the genetic
material of living cells are
all traditional symbols
of medical bioscience, but
what is new is the hexagon
surrounding them, which
is open ‘to show the flow of
knowledge from and towards
the community’.

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