Page 94 - 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

research agenda’. Other signs of this include the increase in the number of MRC
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researchers appointed to WHO technical and advisory panels and the choice of the
MRC as a collaborating centre for several WHO programmes and as the home for the
African Secretariat Office of the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials
Partnership in 2004. The MRC’s acting president at the time, Professor William Pick,
described it as ‘arguably the most significant endorsement of the MRC as a leading
research organisation in its 35-year history’. However, perhaps the high point for the
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MRC of this international recognition was an editorial in the prestigious The Lancet
in 2008, which referred to the MRC in the same breath as the world’s top medical
research institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the
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CNRS–INSERM and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Moreover, in its special
edition devoted to South Africa a year later, ten of The Lancet’s authors were associated
with the MRC. Well might the Council feel that the SETI Review’s description of it
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in 2001 as ‘a national asset with exceptional leadership, managerial and administration
skills’ had been fully endorsed.
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Yet, by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, what underpinned the MRC’s
ascent to high international status was starting to fray, despite new agreements for
collaborative research projects with top international research institutions still being
signed.

The MRC at risk – again

Signs of its faltering financial situation began to manifest themselves in the reduction
of funds to create senior posts in extramural units, in the non-filling of vacancies or
the appointment of acting placeholders only, in the bar placed on the purchase of
equipment other than of a minor variety, and in the slipping pay scales of intramural
staff, all for reasons of economy. As a consequence, between 2008 and 2012 intramural
salaries fell, on average, below the 25th percentile. The effect of this tightening squeeze
on research eventually began to show itself in that most sensitive of markers for the
MRC, the number of peer-reviewed articles published each year. These fell from 706
in 2008 to 648 in 2010 to 451 in 2013.
The ultimate reason for this belt-tightening by the MRC was that its basic grant
from Government failed to keep up with inflation. Between 2008 and 2012 the grant
rose by an average of 3.5 per cent annually while inflation climbed at 6 per cent. So
wide did this gap become that eventually between 2012 and 2015 the MRC had to
budget for a deficit and draw on its reserves to meet its current expenses for four
consecutive years. That it was ‘undoubtedly a troubled time’ was the understated
observation of the chair of the Board, Professor Lizo Mazwai, in retrospect. ‘The

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