The honoured parents who gave birth to the NICD were two venerable public health institutions. First came the esteemed South African Institute for Medical Research (SAIMR), and second, an equally esteemed but younger institution, the Poliomyelitis Research Foundation (PRF). Very soon after their individual births both institutions found themselves accountable for vastly more than their single disease responsibilities, pneumonia in the case of the former and poliomyelitis in the case of the latter.

With the SAIMR it was the wide spectrum of laboratory medicine, and with the PRF the wide array of viral diseases of humans.

THE SAIMR (1912–1999)

In 1912, just two years before the start of the First World War, the Chamber of Mines of South Africa, the employer organisation of the country's mining industry, provided funds for the creation of the SAIMR. Its mission was to carry out research into the various medical challenges facing the mining industry, most specifically pneumonia. The government of the day provided an equal amount of funding for the institute to be a facility to serve the population of the country as a whole.

Not long after the birth of the SAIMR, the First World War broke out and the institute was called on to provide medical support for the war effort. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the institute was again called on to provide medical support for the war effort. This saw a much greater demand on the institute. Supplies of yellow fever and typhus vaccines went north to the military and civilian populations of the African continent involved in the conflict, and the typhus vaccine was sent to the Soviet theatre of the war.

In the earliest days of the SAIMR, the needs of the mining industry ensured that a great deal of energy went into research on bacterial pneumonia, a huge problem among mining personnel at the time. The causative bacterium, the pneumococcus, was rigorously investigated, leading to the development of an effective preventive vaccine. This achievement earned a knighthood for the second director of the SAIMR, Sir Spencer Lister. Research in bacteriology expanded rapidly in the ensuing years, with significant findings being published on a variety of bacteria such as typhoid fever, whooping cough and plague.