Page 98 - 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

The MRC’s executive management team, 2003. Headed by the acting president, Professor
William Pick (sixth from left), they are (left to right) Mr Bulelani Mahlangu (Executive
Director: Finance and Operations), Dr Nico Walters (Executive Director: Technology
and Business Development), Ms Charlene Filies (Acting Executive Manager: Corporate
Affairs), Dr Tony Mbewu (Executive Director: Research), Professor Taole Mokoena (chair
of MRC Board), Pick, Dr Romilla Maharaj (Executive Director: Research Development),
Professor Koos Louw (Executive Director: Information and Knowledge Management), Mr
Brian Williams (Executive Director: Human Resources and Organizational Development).

In his 26 months as acting president, the 60-year-old Pick, a public health specialist
from the University of the Witwatersrand who had been on the MRC Board since
1994, also had to steer the Council through the later phases of the disputes over AIDS
denialism and the rollout of ARVT. His chief attempt to do so, by drawing all HIV/
AIDS researchers at the MRC into one lead programme and using this to create a
single national AIDS research programme, disappeared into the Department of
Health’s maze, however. ‘He might have been good if allowed to stay [as president]’,
judged a senior unit director of the time.
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About the other acting president in these years, Ali Dhansay, the jury of his
peers did not remain out for long. On the staff of the MRC’s Research Institute for
Nutritional Diseases since 1986, he had become head of research at the MRC in 2004,
a position which had thrown him into the deep end of the Council’s internal politics,
as his research institute was not located on the ‘Medicina’ campus. This left him
unfamiliar with the MRC’s day-to-day operation and out of the loop when it came to
the informal exchange of news and views. ‘I came in naive, not knowing the politics
in the executive’, he confessed. ‘For me it was an eye-opener.’ How much more was
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this the case when the Board’s chair asked him, at very short notice, to step in as acting

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