Page 83 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

of hospitalization in the country), and the discovery and development of drugs for use
against endemic diseases like malaria, schistosomiasis and TB, in laboratories where
chemical biology and medicinal chemistry joined forces. The unit responsible for the
last-mentioned, the Drug and Development Research Unit, paid special attention to
finding indigenous African plants as part of its innovative drug discovery programme.
Its inspirational first head from 2009, Professor Kelly Chibale of UCT, made it clear
that he wanted his unit to use ‘Africa’s rich biodiversity’ in particular to establish
‘scientific capacity and infrastructure for drug discovery and development’.
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This aligned it exactly with the Traditional Medicines Research Unit, which,
since its inception in 1997 as an MRC-backed research group located jointly at UCT
and UWC, had struggled to convince both traditional healers and MRC scientists of
its bona fides and capacity to act as a bridge between them ‘without compromising
the standards of science’. The scientists had looked down on the director, Dr
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Motlalepula Matsabisa, as ‘not a true scientist, not qualified enough’, especially as
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he had published few articles. He believed that they thought that he was more ‘in[to]
traditional healing, … someone who was promoting traditional medicines … someone
who was driving an agenda of Government at the time to popularise traditional
medicine for HIV’. Traditional healers, on the other hand, suspected him of ‘making a
lot of money’ when he experimented with traditional remedies in his laboratory while
trying to develop new drugs. He said that they claimed, ‘Here is a white black man who
is not doing the things right; [he] is trying to use the wrong methodologies to prove
traditional medicines.’ Consequently, never having managed to gain full acceptance
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at the MRC or in the field, despite receiving large funding from a Government very
keen to see the efficacy of traditional remedies scientifically proven, organizing
supplementary biomedical instruction for traditional healers, helping to set up the
National Reference Centre for African Traditional Medicine and being a mainstay
of the overarching Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lead Programme at the MRC,
in 2010 the Traditional Medicines Research Unit was incorporated into Chibale’s
unit. ‘We must reclaim our history and our heritage by being curious and trying to
understand more about the herbs that our ancestors used’, Mbewu had argued in
support of this merger as a way of continuing this kind of research.
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Not that ideological reasons were alone responsible for continuing such research.
The fact that the MRC’s Lead Programme on Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS)
was set up by its Technology and Business Development Directorate makes it clear
that turning its research products into supplementary sources of income had once
again risen on the MRC’s priority list. Makgoba spoke of the MRC’s need for a
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‘more business-like approach to research, making it … useful to our customers [and]

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