Ruminations in Korea

Click here to listen to how the Hwang scandal is affecting the publishing world.

Audio Blog? Why not?

UPDATED

The panel made it clear that this could NOT have been an accident. “Based on these facts, the data in the 2005 Science paper cannot be some error from a simple mistake, but [must] be seen as a deliberate fabrication to make it look like 11 stem-cell lines using results from just two.”

They are now investigating every imporant claim he has ever made.

It is OVER for Hwang. I mentioned before that I think he is going to kill himself. I think the odds of that happening has just increased significantly.

UPDATE!

Hwang resigned from his professorship at Seoul National University.

He apologized:
“I sincerely apologize to the people for creating a shock and disappointment.As a symbol of apology, I step down as professor of Seoul National University.”

Well, THAT was pretty insufficient.

The Boston Globe reports that some of the alleged clone stem cell photos used by Hwang in his paper may not be what they seem.

According to the article: “A landmark 2004 paper in which South Korean scientists claimed to have cloned human stem cells for the first time contains photos that appeared in an unrelated paper, calling their claim into question and increasing the controversy that surrounds the team. Two photos in the 2004 paper, published to great fanfare in the journal Science, claim to show batches of the world’s first cloned human embryonic stem cells. Yet the same photos appear in the journal Molecules and Cells, in a research article by another Korean team, submitted before the Science paper, and in that paper both photos are labeled as cells created without cloning.”

Hwang tried to explain away duplicated photographs by blaming the newspaper for printing the wrong pictures. He has had NUMEROUS opportunities to mention and/or explain and/or apologize for the use of pre-existing photographs that had been published in other papers. However, he has never mentioned this. I wonder how he wil attempt to explain this and who he will try to blame it on.

Why does anyone in Korea continue to trust ANYTHING this guys says anymore? That is a rhetorical question, by the way.

What are the results of Hwang’s actions? Here are a few listed in the Boston Globe article:

“The duplication, the scientists said, raised doubts about two of seven tests done to prove the cells were legitimate.”

“raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the overall paper, especially after the questions raised about other work done by the team.”

“The duplicate photos in the 2004 article now call into question his original claim. Hwang is the only scientist to claim to have cloned human stem cells”

“Dr. Robert Lanza, a scientist at Advanced Cell Technology, a Worcester-based biotech that has worked on cloning human cells, and is a competitor of Hwang’s. ”There seems to be a pattern here.”
“ Gee, Dr. Lanza, ya think?

“as the questions mount, scientists say that they cannot have confidence in any of the work the team did.”

“Lanza raised questions about two other papers published by members of Hwang’s team. In one paper, published last year in the Federation of European Biochemical Societies Letters, the results of a test done on two different groups of cells is presented, to compare how they respond to a growth factor. The test generates dark blobs, but two of these blobs seem to look precisely the same, except flipped, which would be very unlikely to happen by chance, Lanza said. This would imply that the test was not actually done, or that a serious mistake was made in preparing the paper. Hwang is not listed as an author on this paper, but two of the authors — Kim Sun Jong and Park Jong Hyuk — are listed on the 2004 cloning paper.”

“In another paper, published in Molecular Reproduction and Development, there are several examples where blobs look exactly the same, even though they are supposed to be generated by different tests. Again, this implies that key tests were not done, or that the authors made errors in preparing their manuscript, Lanza said. Hwang is listed as the senior author.

“Scientists said yesterday they are also concerned about Hwang’s claim to have cloned a dog.”

I wonder what the Vegas odds are on whether or not Hwang will eventually kill himself. I feel that the odds are fairly high that he will.

Dr. Hwang Woo-suk, the cloning, stem cell, Snuppy guy seems to be in VERY, VERY, VERY big trouble.

Unethical research methods, using assistants’ eggs, people (including assistants) being paid for the donations, broken partnership with foreign researcher, said researcher demanding that the paper with his name on it be withdrawn, "errors" leading to duplicated photos….Not looking good at all.

But the rest of the world doesn’t really matter does it, because Hwang still walks on water here in Korea. He is still the savior of mankind here in Korea. Perhaps he will be able to fabricate his own Nobel Prize and write it off as an error when confronted.

The King is dead. Long live the King!

It is 10:00am and the day already has the markings of one of those days that you really wish would never have happened in the first place.

Upon arrival at my office, I walked to the corner convenience store to get something for breakfast.  I arrived at the store and while pondering what to get, I had a sudden urge to get a tuna triangle kimbab (Sort of a triangle version of a sushi roll).

There were 5 middle-aged to old men standing next to the cooler where the kimbab is kept. I walked over and got what I was looking for. As I started to walk away, I head that all-to-common work, "미국놈" (Migook-nom).  Migook is "America," but "nom" is a tricky word to translate.  "Nom" is a word used to indicate animals or objects.  When talking about people, it can mean anything from a casual reference, such as "guy", to something more offensives, such as "bastard."  From context and vocal inflection, the term is most often used in the "bastard" sense of the word.  In any case, it is always a derogatory term. 

Hearing "Migook-nom", my ears perked up to hear one of the older men say in a very snide tone, "These American bastards think they are developing tastes similar to ours. Ha Ha Ha. He passed up the sandwich and took the kimbab." (much giggling from all of the men).

As the store clerk has become somewhat of a good acquaintance, I didn’t feel like causing a scene.  So, instead of being confrontational, I turned to shoot the speaker one of my "you pathetic idiot" stares.  It was at that point I realized they were standing near the cooler because they were using the hot water dispenser to get hot water for their cups of instant Starbucks coffee.  Ah… Ignorance and unnoticed irony…  The speaker had actually said, "These American bastards think they are developing tastes similar to ours," while holding a small cup of Starbucks Cafe Americano in his hand.

Ugh!

I have used this joke before in my writings. I can’t remember where it was from. I think it was from a very old article by Michael Breen, but I could be wrong. It goes like this:

An Englishman comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. He apologizes for interrupting and quietly closes the door on his way out.

An American comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. He pulls out a gun and shoots both his wife and the other man.

A Korean comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. He goes and protests in front of the US Embassy.

It seems that this has happened again. Here is a picture of a particularly unfunny “gag man” named Kim Yong. By and large, Korean “gag men” (sort of a sketch comic) make me want to do just that…gag!. This is particularly true of Kim Yong. Not only do I find him completely unfunny, but he has demonstrated is own laziness and idiocy on so many levels. The picture, then the story.

THE STORY:

On 6 December 2005 at 1:00 pm, Mr. Kim held a one-man demonstration. Where was it held? Of course! He held his demonstration in front of the US Embassy. Why there?

Mr. Kim is protesting the “fact” that the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin” was stolen from a book that he wrote. In the picture, he can be seen holding placards and wearing sign boards saying:

“UNIVERSAL, REVEAL THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR!”
“United International Pictures, why don’t you explain this video?”
“I am a citizen of the Republic of Korea!”

I wish I could see the longer one on his back, but it is hidden from view.

I don’t even want to get into the issue of why he thinks the US Embassy is the place to stage this lonely demonstration or why he thinks anyone at the embassy would even care.

A very simple internet search would have revealed to Mr. Kim that the screenplay was written by Steve Carell and Judd Apatow, and that the movie was based on a skit about a closet virgin that Steve Carell wrote “wrote years ago at Second City”, a brilliant Chicago theater troupe. (See also here, here, and here)

Mr. Kim, while you may not be surprised that there are people in the world funnier than you, and smarter than you, and can come up with a witty idea without your help, you may be somewhat shocked and dismayed that there is no chance that Steve Carell even knows who you are or that he has ever read your book. Also, unless your book was written and distributed around the US in the late 1980’s, the skit came out first. Sorry to burst your little comedic bubble, but you just may be wrong here. Regardless of whether or not you are right or wrong, you look like a pathetic fool standing out there all alone hoping someone takes your picture so that you can get in the media and maybe sell one or two copies of your book to curiousity seekers. If you REALLY feel that your idea was stolen, then put your stupid signs down and go retain the services of a law firm that will sue the snot out of everyone involved in the film.

I don’t know whether to feel angry at his arrogance or to feel pity towards him because he may actually believe that.

Memo to Cindy: I think your 15 minutes of fame are up.

Korean Reds Targeting Christians

By MEGHAN CLYNE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 16, 2005

WASHINGTON - A woman in her 20s executed by a firing squad after being caught with a Bible. Five Christian church leaders punished by being run over by a steamroller before a crowd of spectators who “cried, screamed out, or fainted when the skulls made a popping sound as they were crushed.”

These and other “horrifying” violations of human rights and religious freedom in North Korea are reported in a new study by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, titled “‘Thank You, Father Kim Il Sung’: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion in North Korea.”

The report, released yesterday, comes as President Bush is touring Asia, calling for increased political freedom. In remarks prepared for delivery early this morning in Japan, the president called on Red China to extend more freedom to its population of 1.3 billion. In an advance text of the speech, President Bush also extolled Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province, as “a free and democratic Chinese society.” And the president noted North Korean human rights abuses while reassuring the Hermit Kingdom’s people.

“Satellite maps of North Korea show prison camps the size of whole cities,” Mr. Bush said. “We will not forget the people of North Korea.”

Yesterday on Capitol Hill the chairman of the Commission on International Religious Freedom, Michael Cromartie, and two members of Congress who helped establish the commission, Reps. Frank Wolf of Virginia and Chris Smith of New Jersey, called on Mr. Bush to include the specific findings of the North Korean report in his diplomatic discussions with Chinese and South Korean officials this week, and to urge leaders of both Asian nations to take a firmer stand against their communist neighbor.

Mr. Cromartie told The New York Sun after the event that senior administration officials at the National Security Council had been provided with an advance copy of the report so that Mr. Bush could raise particular human rights abuses with his Chinese and South Korean interlocutors.

Mr. Cromartie said yesterday during the study’s unveiling on Capitol Hill that the report was unique in its depth and breadth, and in the quantity of first-hand accounts, since it is notoriously difficult to obtain reliable information from inside North Korea, owing to the country’s complete isolation under the Kim dictatorship.

Among the first-hand reports are eyewitness accounts of Christians’ being executed for the underground practice of their faith.

The study recounts, for example, how in November 1996 in North Korea’s South Pyongan province, a unit of the North Korean army was tasked with widening a highway connecting Pyongyang to a nearby port city. While demolishing a vacant house, soldiers found in the basement, hidden between two bricks, a Bible and a list of 25 names. Among the list were individuals identified as a Christian pastor, two assistant pastors, two elders, and 20 parishioners who were identified by their occupations.

Hunted down at their workplaces by military police, the 25 Christians were rounded up and detained without any formal judicial procedure. Later that month, the parishioners and their clergy were brought to the road construction site, where spectators had been arranged in neat rows to observe the public execution of the pastor, assistant pastors, and elders. According to a report based on an eyewitness account, the five church leaders “were bound hand and foot and made to lie down in front of a steamroller,” accused of subversion and of being Kiddokyo, or Protestant Christian, spies.

The 20 parishioners were detained near their clergy, and watched, along with the assembled audience, as the five Christian leaders were told they could escape death if they denied their faith and pledged to serve only Kim Jong Il and his father, the first dictator of communist Korea, Kim Il Sung. According to the eyewitness, the clergy remained silent.

For their steadfast belief, the Christians were executed. According to the report, “Some of the fellow parishioners assembled to watch the execution cried, screamed out, or fainted when the skulls made a popping sound as they were crushed beneath the steamroller.”

Another account contained in the report says that on a summer day in North Korea in 1997, a young woman was washing clothes in a tributary of the Tumen River when she dropped a small Bible she had hidden amid the laundry. Spotted by a fellow washerwoman, the girl was reported to North Korean authorities on the suspicion that she was engaging in an exercise of thought or religion condemned by the state. The girl, believed to be in her 20s, and her father, estimated to be around 60, were arrested by local national security police and imprisoned for three months.

One morning, they were taken to a public market area, where, after a brief show trial, the father and daughter were condemned as traitors to the North Korean nation and its communist dictator, Kim Jong Il. The father and daughter were then tied to stakes a few meters from where they had been “tried,” and, before an assembly of schoolchildren, were riddled with bullets by seven policemen who fired three shots each into the pair. According to a report drawn from eyewitness accounts, “The force of the rifle shots, fired from fifteen meters away, caused blood and brain matter to be blown out of their heads.”

The study was compiled by the author of “Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,” David Hawk, who was assisted by two South Korean researchers, Jae Chunwon and Philo Kim. Together they interviewed 40 re cent North Korean defectors to gain insight into the religious lives of average North Koreans.

From the interviews, according to Mr. Cromartie, the Commission had obtained a “horrifying picture” of the abuses suffered by Christians and other believers in North Korea.

All of the interviewees had fled to South Korea through China, which has become something of a “safety valve” for North Koreans fleeing religious persecution, Mr. Smith told the Sun yesterday. According to the study, China has received a flood of refugees fleeing the Kim dictatorship, and between 50,000 and 100,000 North Korean exiles remain in China, the commission reported.

China, however, considers dissident North Koreans “economic migrants” subject to repatriation, and the study presents a dismal account of those forced to return to North Korea. According to one defector who was grilled by North Korean border guards, the Kim regime fears that “Juche will be toppled by Christianity,” referring to the state ideology, and exercises brutal control over North Koreans who have been exposed to Chinese or South Korean Christian churches.

According to the study, in order to preserve the complete control Kim Jong Il exercises over his subjects’ minds, repatriated North Koreans are harshly interrogated to determine whether they will infect their countrymen with ideas and information obtained abroad, and Christian believers are often slapped with long prison sentences and hard labor, punishments sometimes passed on to their families and descendants.

The documented fear of Christianity is accompanied by an extensive account of the pervasiveness of the Kims’ cult of personality, and the title of the study, “Thank you, Father Kim Il-Sung,” refers to the phrase North Korean parents are required to first teach their children.

Why is it so difficult to meet successful Korean professionals in the global market? Well, HERE’S A FEW REASONS WHY:

1. Koreans lack an independent mindset. They are particularly lacking a positive drive to take the initiative.

2. They lack a sense of pursuing excellence. They just try to compete with colleagues in a company, rather than seek excellence.

3. They fail in logical and creative thinking.

4. They cannot handle open-ended quesions creatively

5. Some simply do not listen to questions that are asked.

That about sums it up. Oh… and before anyone starts moaning, complaining, calling me a racisit, telling me to go home if I don’t like Korea, etc., it should be pointed out that the above statements were made by a Korean professional about Koreans. I had nothing to do with those comments. Read more here at the Korea Herald

I completely agree with the person who made those comments. I have talked about this issue before and in detail.

From that controversial, satirical, and funny online “news” magazine, The Onion:

Delta Blues Poised For Biggest Revival Since 1915

September 28, 2005 | Issue 41-39

NEW ORLEANS?Blues historians report that Delta blues, an early blues form that arose in the Mississippi Delta region, is poised for its biggest revival since 1915. “Death, loss, heartbreak, isolation, hard luck, that’s what the blues have been missing for decades,” said music critic Joel Kushner. “But now, even the most sheltered, derivative Delta blues musician should have enough material to cut an album.” The revival is heralded by the recent singles “FEMA Don’t Come ‘Round No More,” “Category Five Woman Done Me Six Kinds Of Wrong,” and “Talkin’ Drownded Kin Blues.”

Message from a Korean friend about a trip to Carribean Bay water park explaining this picture:

Look at this!!! I have never seen anything like this!
Cool! It’s a self-service gas pump.
You actually put the gas in by yourself and pay for it right there at the pump.
It’s even a little bit cheaper.
Isn’t that amazing???

Ummm.. yeah.. uhh.. awesome…Koreans think of everything! That might catch on in America soon!
Just wait until the first time is 25 below Zero in the middle of a white-out blizzard and they have to pump their own gas while the dropout loser laughs at you from inside the warm, dry store because your bare hand has frozen to the pump and you have to scrape ice out of the credit card slot. THEN they will yearn for the good old days of full service stations.

While reading The Asia Pages, I had a thought. It’s not the first time I have had this thought. In fact, I have this thought quite often:

Do you ever get the feeling that Korean really, really WANTS to be the victim of a terrorist attack, if for no other reason than it would somehow legitimize Korea as a really significant and important country?

I have commented before on Koreans’ endless need to compare its places and people to OTHER places and people, seemingly in an effort to give some validity to the Korean situation.

But THIS… This has just crossed the line well into absurdity:

“Park Jin, a two-term lawmaker of the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP), might as well be called the Joschka Fischer of South Korea.”

WHAT?

“Only, Park hasn’t experienced the yo-yo syndrome Fischer did _ and doesn’t intend to, either.”

HUH?

“And the 49-year-old politician confessed that the German foreign minister of the Green Party, who is also well-known in Korea for the translated version of his book, “Nanun Dalinda (I Run),’’ gave him constant food for thought while on his diet program.”

Whatever.

Heaven done called another PC gamer back home.

From Reuters:
S.Korean man dies after 50 hours of computer games
Tue Aug 9, 2005 11:44 AM BST

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said on Tuesday.

The 28-year-old man, identified only by his family name Lee, had been playing on-line battle simulation games at the cybercafe in the southeastern city of Taegu, police said.

Lee had planted himself in front of a computer monitor to play on-line games on August 3. He only left the spot over the next three days to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed, they said.

“We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion,” a Taegu provincial police official said by telephone.

Lee had recently quit his job to spend more time playing games, the daily JoongAng Ilbo reported after interviewing former work colleagues and staff at the Internet cafe.

After he failed to return home, Lee’s mother asked his former colleagues to find him. When they reached the cafe, Lee said he would finish the game and then go home, the paper reported.

He died a few minutes later, it said.

South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, has a large and highly developed game industry.