Page 9 - 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 transition in the late-apartheid era, 1985–1994; the years of optimism but also of
HIV/AIDS, 1994–2012; the years of rebuilding, 2012–2022; and the stress test posed
by the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020.
For their invaluable assistance in helping me in numerous ways during this project
I wish to put on record my sincere gratitude to Dr Niresh Bhagwandin, the MRC’s
most dexterous pilot of this project; his boundlessly willing and efficient secretary, Ms
Arlene Smith; the MRC’s highly skilled and zealous photographer, Mr Allen Jefthas;
those knowledgeable and vigilant commentators on my draft chapters, Emeritus
Professor Wieland Gevers and Dr Kit Vaughan; and the almost forty interviewees, who
added so richly to my understanding of the MRC. My sharp-eyed and sharp-witted
editor, Dr Russell Martin, has exercised his level-headed judgement to the text’s great
benefit, for which I thank him. Finally, the input and ongoing support of the original
initiator of this history project, Professor Glenda Gray, have been invaluable and gone
a long way towards making this historian feel quite at home among the MRC’s medical
scientists.
Some years ago, the then president of the MRC, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba,
observed that ‘the history of science and technology in Africa is old, but the history of
science and technology institutes in Africa is a rarity’. I hope that what follows helps
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to redress this imbalance.

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