Focus on the NHMRC: Battling bafflement

How Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council makes million-dollar bets on ideas and investigators

Nearly 100 years ago, Australia decided it needed a dedicated research body for health. The Federal Health Council came into being in 1926 and met for the first time in 1927. A decade later, it became the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Billy Hughes, then health minister and later prime minister, said the council would aim to “promote the health of the people of Australia, protect them from disease, and advise, coordinate and direct research into the cause of, and cure for, those diseases which levy so heavy a toll upon the community, and which have hitherto baffled medical science”.