Page 84 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

Biomedicine meets traditional medicine: Mr Joseph Nyelimane (in an emblematic white
coat), a technician in the Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS) Lead Programme, takes
traditional healers on a tour of the IKS laboratories and its medicine production factory in
2010. He is showing them the medicine bottling section, explaining labelling and barcoding
as well as the batch-labelling process using the Newman machine.

… implementable … for the market-place … [so as] to erase the deficits from its
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balance sheet’. In the case of traditional medicines, it was hoped that research into
these would yield pharmacological breakthroughs which would offer remedies for
a host of diseases widespread in Africa, not least of which was HIV/AIDS. As the
MRC’s Strategic Plan wishfully put it, thereby it hoped to make IKS ‘a valued health
model in the global environment and to redress health traditions, which until now
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have neglected [local] health priorities and issues’.
The Technology and Business Development Directorate had originated in the
MRC’s efforts to address the state’s ongoing reduction of its grants in the early
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1990s without running the risk of another Medtech fiasco. To do this, it sought
to market research conducted under its auspices, at first very cautiously, putting in
place several overlapping structures and steps to achieve this. Encouraged on this
path by the new Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology and the first
Science, Engineering, Technology Institutions (SETI) Review in 1997, it created not
only a Medical Innovation Centre to negotiate contracts with the private sector, but
also a Research Translation Office to help researchers make the transition from idea
to product and, in 2001, a dedicated Business Development Division to ‘change the

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