Its task is to work with the universities, and UK research councils and Scottish Hospital Endowments Research Trust, another unique creation of the NHS in Scotland, pooling individual hospitals’ funding from the old system.
It goes on to back a whole range of projects across the biomedical and social sciences.
Sir Andrew Watt Kay, professor of surgery at Glasgow, is its first director. A good choice. This is confirmed in 1990 by his peers: his study on histamines at the Western Infirmary in the 1950s was the most cited British Medical Journal paper since the war, ahead of Doll and Bradford Hill’s paper on smoking.
The result of Kay’s research is a reliable test for duodenal ulcers, which provides the basis for James Black’s histamine blocker drug, and saves countless patients from unnecessary surgery.