On a hot summer's morning just over 30 years ago, I drove through the gates of the National Institute for Virology (NIV) for my first meeting with Professor Barry Schoub. As I entered, the institute looked austere and its tight security foreboding, in sharp contrast to the smiling welcome from Schoub as he greeted me and then escorted me to his office for a meeting regarding vaccines. The institute was world renowned for its work on polio vaccines and haemorrhagic fevers in its biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. As it was subsequently expanded and renamed as the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), it stood as a citadel of science against the threat Africa faced from existing and emerging infectious diseases.

Infectious diseases and pandemics remain major challenges to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, especially in Africa. To combat these threats, governments usually establish public health institutions, which bring together scientists and public health practitioners. The principal goal is to undertake surveillance and research in order to provide information and advice to policymakers on how to deal with these diseases.

Covid-19 catapulted the NICD into the public eye. From the first case in South Africa, it provided daily statistics on cases and deaths as well as scientific information to guide the country's pandemic response. While the NICD, as South Africa's public health agency or institution, may have risen to prominence in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it was already well known for its track record in infectious diseases, most recently epitomised by its investigation of the country's listeriosis outbreak in 2017. Although the reputation of the NICD went well beyond South Africa's borders – through, for example, the assistance it provided to countries in West Africa during their Ebola outbreaks – its rich history is not widely known. This authoritative account of how the NICD of today came into existence, told by the virologist at the heart of its creation, remedies that gap.

Barry Schoub vividly captures how Professor James Gear's research and development of a polio vaccine led to the initial creation of the Poliomyelitis Research Foundation (PRF) in the 1950s. Resourced from the ‘march of the tickeys’ (based on the very successful ‘march of dimes’ initiative for polio fundraising in the US), the foundations were laid for the government subsequently to create the NIV, which merged decades later in 2002 with the South African Institute for Medical Research (SAIMR) to become the NICD.