Page 58 - 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

researchers, whether in Africa or overseas. An MP praised this as representing ‘an
opening up and a spirit of internationalism which must … contribute to our sense of
participation and co-operation with the rest of the world, including our immediate
neighbours’. One of the first instances of this changing outlook was the establishment
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in 1992 of a National Malaria Research Programme, aiming to incorporate researchers
in five neighbouring countries to engage in research in this field as a springboard to
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eradicating the disease in the region.
Nor was the MRC slow to foster such contacts outside the subcontinent too, as
links with South Africa became more acceptable internationally even before 1994.
Thus, whereas by the late 1980s, anti-apartheid isolation and boycotts of the country’s
researchers and their institutions had cut the MRC’s international ties significantly –
in 1986 Brink lamented ‘a very worrying trend of non-participation by internationally
recognised scientists from abroad at our scientific meetings’ – by the end of 1991 its
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new chairman was expressing relief at how, following the release of Nelson Mandela
from prison and the start of negotiations for democracy, ‘the broadening political
horizons within the country are opening the doors of the MRC and its researchers

A Kenyan delegation from the UNESCO African Network of Scientific and Technological
Institutions meeting with a team from the MRC in 1991. Those from the MRC are the president,
Professor Wally Prozesky (at head of the table); Dr John Austin, head of the MRC Animal
Facility Utility, Delft (alongside Prozesky); and Dr Sinclair Wynchank (extreme left), the
director of the MRC Research Institute for Medical Biophysics. The names of the three members
of the Kenyan delegation were not provided.

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