Higher Education, Science and Innovation Minister Dr Blade Nzimande has congratulated the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on its seventy-fifth anniversary. The Council was established by an Act of Parliament and came into being on October 5, 1945.

“Over the years, I have been observing, with great pride, the work that the organisation does; work that has made a huge contribution to our country,” he said. “We are proud of what the CSIR has achieved in the past 75 years through science, technology, engineering and innovation. We also pay tribute to the leadership; the scientists and all the support staff, who over the years, particularly since the new dispensation into our democracy, have passionately, and are continuing to contribute to the transformation of the organisation.”

“The CSIR has been committed to pushing boundaries in our quest for excellent research, technological innovation, and industrial and scientific development,” he added. “This is evident in the many sectors of our economy that you are impacting through the support you provide to government and the citizens, addressing the majority of the focus areas outlined in the National Development Plan.”

The most recent example was the CSIR’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. After the pandemic reached the country, the CSIR re-roled some of its laboratories to support the government’s programme of massively increasing testing for the disease. The Council was also one of the leaders in the local development of ventilators and rapid testing kits, as well as in the tracking and tracing of Covid-19 cases around South Africa.

The past 21 years alone have seen the CSIR develop important initiatives, create and establish new capabilities, and set up new facilities, to the benefit of the country. The organisation’s online services, Worldnet Africa and CompuServe, for example, were sold to MIH Limited and combined into Mweb, which initiated commercial Internet services in the country.

And in 2002, CSIR researchers generated the first induced pluripotent stem cells in Africa. These have since been used by scientists to examine interactions between specific cell types and pathogens, within an African genetic context. The CSIR Centre for High Performance Computing, set up in 2007, provides local researchers with massive computing power. And in 2015 it assigned a computing cluster to support the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (much better known as CERN). That cluster was dedicated to two CERN particle detector experiments.

There are yet more examples, such as the CSIR’s clinical and botanical supplies unit, established in 1999. Or the Biomanufacturing Industry Development Centre, set up in 2014. And then there was the creation, around 2015, of the country’s first locally-calibrated high-resolution national woody cover map – which involved the use of both satellite-based synthetic aperture radar and pre-existing light detection and ranging datasets.