Buhm Soon Park

It was well said by Clerk Maxwell: ‘For the sake of persons of different types of mind scientific truth should be presented in different forms, and should be regarded as equally scientific whether it appears in the robust form and colouring of a physical illustration, or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolical expression.’ From N. V. Sidgwick's Presidential Address to the Chemical Society, London, 1937 During the years between 1930 and 1950, chemistry underwent a transformation that affected

This article explores the place of computation in the history of quantum theory by examining the development of several approximation methods to solve the Schrödinger equation without using empirical information, as these were worked out in the years from 1927 to 1933. These ab initio methods, as they became known, produced the results that helped validate the use of quantum mechanics in many-body atomic and molecular systems, but carrying out the computations became increasingly laborious and d

This paper explores the rise of the National Institutes of Health after World War II from the perspective of intramural scientists working at the NIH's main campus in Bethesda. Several postwar social circumstances-the local research tradition, the wartime experience of civilian scientists, the doctor draft, and anti-nepotism rules in academia-affected the recruitment of research-oriented scientists into the NIH. These historically contingent factors were no less important than the larger politic

The cadre of physician-scientists trained in the ATP during the Doctor Draft rose through the academic ranks to leadership roles and continued their productive scientific collaborations. Their legacy continues to have implications for medical research today, particularly for training programs in clinical research.

Estuaries, vital coastal ecosystems, face growing threats from industrialization. To understand the pace of sedimentary changes and heavy metal pollution at the anthropogenically altered and industrialized Nakdong River Estuary in South Korea, we used sediment coring to reconstruct environmental change. Estuarine dam construction in 1934 shifted the sedimentary system from sand to mud, coinciding with a post-1930s mercury increase due to coal burning. Mercury concentrations in other South Korean

This paper revisits the "Hwang case," which shook Korean society and the world of stem cell research in 2005 with the fraudulent claim of creating patient-specific embryonic stem cells. My goal is to overcome a human-centered, Korea-oriented narrative, by illustrating how materials can have an integral role in the construction and judgment of fraud. To this end, I pay attention to Woo Suk Hwang's lab at Seoul National University as a whole, including human and nonhuman agents, that functioned as

This paper examines WHO's involvement in South Korea within the context of the changing organization of public health infrastructure in Korea during the years spanning from the end of the Japanese occupation, through the periods of American military occupation and the Korean War, and to the early years of the Park Chung Hee regime in the early 1960s, in order to demonstrate how tuberculosis came to be addressed as a public health problem. WHO launched several survey missions and relief efforts b

Abstract No scientific concept in the twenty-first century has garnered more attention from scholars outside the scientific community than the Anthropocene. Despite the official rejection by the geological community in March 2024 of the proposal for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of the Geological Time Scale, it is expected to remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on Earth. It is also undeniable that it will continue to inspire vigorous studies not only in geology, ecology, and

For the Anthropocene to get recognized as a real geological era, first and foremost its strata must be identified.Several geological formations such as bogs, lakebeds, reefs, ice sheets, speleothems, river estuary deposits, and sea floors have been considered as potential candidates for the Anthropocene strata.This consideration arises from the emergence of novel materials associated with the Anthropocene, including radioactive isotopes, plastics, and aluminum, started to be discovered in their