The transnational move of interdisciplinarity: Ginseng and the beginning of neuroscience in South Korea, 1970–1990s

ABSTRACT

Neuroscience did not suddenly become a global endeavor. This article examines the way neuroscience took shape in South Korea focusing on Chan-Woong Park, who launched the Korean Society for Neuroscience in 1992. Park was a pharmacologist who studied ginseng and the brain from the 1970s. By revealing the way Park noted both opportunity and difficulty in the interdisciplinarity of neuroscience, this article reveals the context in which interdisciplinarity shaped studies of the brain in South Korea. To date, historians have followed the flow of knowledge, embedded in materials or instruments, to understand the transnational development of science and technology. This article focuses on the flow of value—interdisciplinarity, per se—which mediated uncertainties in studying the brain and galvanized ignorance in the name of neuroscience. By revealing the materiality and locality of interdisciplinarity and its role in facilitating ignorance, the article sheds new light on the transnational development of neuroscience.

KEYWORDS:

• Ginseng
• ignorance
• interdisciplinarity
• South Korea
• transnational history

Acknowledgments

The preliminary finding of this work was presented at the International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia (ICHSEA) in August 2019. The author wishes to thank Buhm Soon Park for his inspiring comments on this research. The author also thanks Geun Bae Kim who provided constructive comments on my dissertation chapter which this paper relied upon. Finally, the author deeply appreciates critical and constructive feedback from anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In this article, interdisciplinarity is used as a generic term that implies attempts to bring together different bodies of knowledge; it is used synonymously with terms such as multidisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity. In the early 1960s, according to the introductory brochure of the Neurosciences Research Program, neuroscience was formed “to facilitate the investigation of brain function and behavior through a unique interdisciplinary, interuniversity, and international organization of highly creative scientists” (Neurosciences Research Foundation 1962).

² There have been few scholarly studies on the history of neuroscience, especially in nonclinical settings in the late-twentieth century in South Korea, whereas a few scholars have studied the clinical history of neurology and psychiatry in the early-twentieth century (Jeong 2014; Lee 2013; Yoo 2016).

³ For more about the study of ignorance, see the work of agnotology scholars (Gross and McGoey 2015; Kourany and Carrier 2020; McGoey 2012; Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). They have revealed how ignorance was constructed—either passively or actively—resulting in harmful effects to the public. At the same time, they have shown how ignorance was used to promote promoting certain lines of thought.

⁴ Although Park studied ginseng, he was not a specialist in Eastern medicine. Park distanced himself from Eastern medicine researchers over the revision of the Pharmaceutical Law as further discussed. In that sense, this article does not simply present tension between Eastern and Western medicine. The article does not essentialize the notion of Eastern and Western medicine by saying that there was a tension between the two. Rather, it regards the two as historical constructs.

⁵ Schmitt was not the only person who contributed to forming neuroscience in the United States, yet he has been highlighted as the leading figure in the launch of the Neurosciences Research Program in the 1960s; the first neuroscience program in the United States.

⁶ It shows that a specific style of thought in biology—behaviorism or cognitivism—is not what can be easily transferred and shared among different countries, but what requires distinctive material and practical apparatus to make it into being.

⁷ In this process, it is notable that Park and his colleagues often cited Israel I. Berkhamn’s works. Brekhman was a Russian scientist who studied medical effects of the Araliaceae family, a plant family made of 62 genera and 700 species of flowering plants including ivies, rice-paper plants, and ginseng. His research received much attention by Korean researchers and helped to make herb studies intellectually interesting (Brekhman 1963).

⁸ This controversy over the manufacturing right of Eastern medicine continued into the 1990s. In 1993, the biggest conflict erupted (Ha 2005).

⁹ A more detailed study of the Society for Neuroscience’s development is beyond the scope of this article. The investigation of the evolution of interdisciplinarity in the United States—focusing on the role of the Society for Neuroscience—is the author’s next project.

¹⁰ See David Healy’s (2002) work on the rise of psycho- or neuropharmacology in the United States and David Herzberg’s (2009) work on the proliferation of “happy pills” such as Miltown, Valium, and Prozac and their surrounding industries and cultures. Also, see Elliot S. Valenstein’s work (2005), especially Chapter 10, on the emergence of new scientific discoveries about neurotransmitters in the central nervous system in the United States.

¹¹ As Park recalled, during the democratization movement of the late 1980s, university classes met irregularly, and laboratories were under temporary management. Park thought the seminar could contribute to sustaining research activities and researchers’ interaction under these conditions (Park 2009, 198).

¹² At the hearing, there was a controversy over the definition of basic medical research. The research team decided to define basic medical research by including not only researchers in basic medicine departments but also basic researchers in clinical medicine departments as well as basic researchers in private industries other than universities (Research Committee for Korean Basic Medical Research 1989a, 149).

¹³ In 1990, supported by the private Daewoo Foundation, Chan-Woong Park and Seung-Yup Kim at the Center published an introductory book on neuroscience (Park and Kim 1990).

¹⁴ Park continued to take interest in ginseng in the 2000s (Park 2001). It is difficult to say that he succeeded in discovering new functions of the brain or changing the paradigm of neuroscience as he wished. However, to date, a few scholars kept studying ginseng in this direction in relation to the central nervous system, although they are not mainstream. Regardless of whether ginseng studies resulted in remarkable discoveries, it is important to remember what meanings ginseng had at the beginning of neuroscience in South Korea and its impact.

¹⁵ In 1998, the Korean Society for Neuroscience became the Korean Society for Brain and Neural Science by merging with the Korean Society for Neurobiology.

¹⁶ To date, many international initiatives have been launched in neuroscience by regarding the brain as a common mystery and neuroscience as a global endeavor. South Korea also took part in the International Brain Initiatives as a node of facilitating neuroscience in East Asia. Yet, as this article shows, the meaning of studying the brain and neuroscience has been highly dependent on its locality and materiality. The globalization of neuroscience was not a natural outcome but the accumulation of contingent local interplay of visions and actions. It would be interesting to see its impact on local clinical and nonclinical settings for treating and using the brain.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by research funds for newly appointed professors of Jeonbuk National University in 2021 and by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2020S1A5B5A16082494].