Page 93 - 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

In keeping with the MRC’s commitment to disseminate news of research done
under its auspices, it set up a Research Translation Office to make its research
comprehensible to laypeople ‘in a language understood by them’, and also
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made extensive use of the mainstream press with whose science correspondents
in particular it cultivated good relations. Beyond this press coverage, to reach the
general public the MRC also relied on dedicated educational, intervention, exhibition
and outreach programmes which, more and more from the late 1990s, it organized in
township schools and neglected urban and rural communities. How successful these
were beyond the moment of delivery it is difficult to tell. Certainly this response
by one Khayelitsha resident to a piece of imaginative street theatre about diabetes
in 2003 satisfied the MRC sufficiently to gain it mention in the MRC News. After
the performance, the resident was reported as having announced, ‘I did not know
anything about diabetes but today you came and I learned so much. Keep it up, please
come again.’ 137
To make its work better known among more specific groups, the MRC and several
of its units also established dedicated journals, magazines and publication series aimed
at particular readerships. Thus, as the scope of its research grew in the 1990s, to its
20-year-old MRC News, which was aimed at interested laypeople, there were added
more focused publications primarily for health professionals like the Urbanisation
and Health Newsletter, the AIDS Bulletin and the Trauma Review. ‘There has been a
historical communication barrier between scientists and the lay public’, explained the
head of the Corporate Affairs Division. ‘We need to close the gap because one of our
key deliverables as a science council is interaction with our stakeholders.’
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For ‘decision-makers and health professionals’ the MRC Policy Briefs series
was begun in 1997 so as to alert them to the latest research findings in their field
and to recommend policy changes in the light of these. For fellow scientists
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occasional technical reports began to be published from 1997, though these of course
complemented articles in scholarly journals, which, the Board averred, ‘remain
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internationally the most important measure of scientific output’. Indeed, the MRC
urged its researchers to publish in top international journals ‘to benchmark themselves
against the world … to ensure that the MRC consistently produces outputs … which
lead to high impact within the science community’. As a result, from the start of the
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21st century, publication counts were minutely reported in every MRC annual report.
The rising number of such peer-reviewed articles by MRC-linked authors from
the mid-1990s onwards is but one telling marker of the rapid ascent of the Council’s
international reputation. Indeed, the 2001 SETI Review believed that the MRC
‘is on its way to becoming a global role player in setting the international health

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