Transnational Scientific Networks and the Research University: The Making of a South Korean Community at the University of Utah, 1948–1970

Abstract

This article seeks to interrogate the tensions present with the descriptive phrase kwahak kisul (science and technology), often used to represent the growth of South Korean scientific and technical expertise in the mid-1960s, by tracing the material practice of postwar South Korean science and technology back to Japanese imperial formations (late 1920s) and forward to Cold War American institutions of higher learning. Focusing specifically on one community, a group of physical chemists studying at the University of Utah for a period of roughly two decades (mid-1950s through early to mid-1970s), the article argues that these Koreans came to the United States after the Korean War for the opportunity to further their studies and in doing so dramatically transformed their science and very possibly their personal identities as well. The major actor motivating this activity, the physical chemist Lee Tae-kyu, provided the focus for the creation of this informal research group, and the article therefore tracks his career from 1930s Kyoto to Utah and, finally, back to Seoul.

Keywords:

• South Korea
• North Korea
• comparative science and technology
• Japanese empire
• Korean War

Notes

¹ Lee's name is generally romanized as Lee Tae-kyu, with Lee Tae-Gyu an acceptable variant. In the course of his professional life, Lee was known variously as Taikyue Ree (at Utah), Lee Tae-kyu, Alexius T. Ree (the name he used frequently in the United States for his publications), and Ri Taeki (his Japanese name at Kyoto). The significance of these different names will be addressed in the concluding sections.

² Unless otherwise noted, details about Lee's career at the University of Utah are taken from various papers and other documents in the University Archives, University of Utah.

³ “A Report on the Condition of the Chemistry Department” (27 May 1948) chronicles the “sad experience” of failing to recruit new graduate students.

⁴ Lee was employed as an instructor (1931–36), an assistant professor (1935–43), and a professor (1943–1945) at Kyoto. He then held a position as dean of science and engineering (1945) and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Seoul National University (1946–48) before traveling to Utah. See Lee's biographical information in Lee 1962.

⁵ The letter from Princeton dean Hugh Taylor (19 June 1948) also informs Lee that the US State Department had been wondering about his whereabouts after July 1941, not surprising given the subsequent outbreak of war in December of that year: as of 1948, Lee was still a Japanese national by the United States. As for Princeton, documents available at the Department of Chemistry list him as “Ri Taeki,” a Japanese postdoc, for the period 1939–41.

⁶ Lee's son, Francis H. Ree, agrees with the claim that Lee was probably influenced by the political circumstances at SNU to extend his stay in Utah.

⁷ These individuals have been described as having been “kidnapped,” but it is likely that a fair number of them voluntarily went north either before or during the war. Kim Geun-Bae (김근배) of Chonbuk University has probably written the most effectively about the movement of these figures to the north, as has Tae-ho Kim of Seoul National University in his unpublished master's thesis. See also Kong 1995 and C. Kim 2010.

⁸ For example, at Korean Institute of Science and Technology (as of 1969), two of the eight section heads were Utah graduates.

⁹ Ahn used the term affectionately, however, and did not intend to convey any malice. Many of the newspaper accounts of A. Ray Olpin, former president of the University of Utah, during his 1965 visit to Seoul refer to a “Utah Club,” presumably an alumni (not just chemistry) organization based in Seoul.

¹⁰ Their first jointly authored paper was Lee and Eyring 1940.

¹¹ Francis H. Ree worked at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from 1960 to 2000, while Teresa Ree Chay took a position as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh. Both children completed the doctorate at Utah extremely rapidly, with Teresa completing both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in a period of five years. According to her brother, Teresa persuaded her father to allow her to jump from the junior year of high school to undergraduate work by refusing to speak to him for a period of approximately six months. Lee Tae-kyu then consented to his daughter's plan, at which point she began speaking to him again.

¹² Prominent among these individuals is Dr. Chung Kun Mo, who has written a number of books on this subject.

¹³ This generalization is made on the basis of surveys conducted by Sogang College in the early 1960s as it sought to recruit Korean doctoral holders to take faculty positions. Yet another example of these networks would be the group of students trained in fluorine chemistry by Joseph D. Park (박달조) at the University of Colorado.

¹⁴ Lee cites three of these publications with Eyring in his communication with Taylor: Lee and Eyring 1940, Lee and Eyring 1941a, and Lee and Eyring 1941b.

¹⁵ This popular image suited Eyring well, particularly as it elided his many interests in military and civil defense.

¹⁶ In this case, it was fairly explicit that these students were working with ordnance and doing military defense work for Taiwan.

¹⁷ Jhon continued working with hexagonal water until his death. In his The Water Puzzle and the Hexagonal Key (2004), he attempts to relate particular forms of water clusters to health and aging.

¹⁸ These developments would coincide with the nation's Third and Fourth Economic Plans, as well as the Yusin government (1972–1979), at which point Park suspended the constitution.

¹⁹ Francis Ree remembers that there were several Japanese postdoctoral researchers at the time of his arrival in Utah in 1954. Although his father did not know the majority of these individuals from his time in Kyoto, it is possible that they came to Utah on the basis of his reputation in Japan. As for the Koreans, the first arrivals generally were drawn to Lee's reputation, with the exception of Kim Kak-Choong (PhD 1962), who had a personal connection.

²⁰ I am relying on the self-reported date recorded in the introductions to the two dissertations.

²¹ The South Korean fellowship program may simply have been suspended in 1961 until the new government could figure out how to proceed. This explanation would fit best with other developments from the period.

²² Chang returned to Seoul to become a professor of chemistry at SNU, after which he continued to pass many of his best students along to the Eyring-Lee team for further training.

²³ Eyring's and Chang's letters concerning Sang-Hyung Kim, for example, dating from 1967 until 1974, for example, followed Kim's entire career at Utah through the completion of his degree.

²⁴ An NSF application from 1966 represents one among the many grants for which the department applied during its ambitious period of expansion in the 1960s.

²⁵ The new Chemistry Building officially opened as of 1967, so the construction dominated the decade.

²⁶ This can be confirmed both by the grants cited in the introduction page for student dissertations and by the presence of student names on Eyring's grant applications.

²⁷ The students I have talked with recall Eyring as a constant presence, but his administrative schedule likely made Lee more accessible on a day-to-day basis.

²⁸ Lee maintained an alarm clock always set for 1 a.m., signaling to those working in his office and lab when it was appropriate to return home. According to his son, he was so preoccupied with research that his wife once handled the details of the move to a new home, and Lee retuned home in the late evening to find an empty house, apparently unaware that the move had taken place earlier that day.

²⁹ This point represents speculation on my part. Lee's son remains fairly certain that his father did not maintain contact with his Kyoto-era colleagues after his move to the United States. Even if the two did not meet at Kyoto, it is likely that Hirai would have known of Lee's reputation, providing him with sufficient incentive to do postdoctoral work at Utah.

³⁰ Teresa Ree, appearing as T. S. Ree to distinguish her work from that of her father, achieved a substantial publication record very early in her career.

³¹ These two textbooks, known for their green and red covers, became standard at Utah and, by extension, South Korea.

³² Return culture shock was also a problem; this becomes clear particularly in the letters between Eyring and Jhon upon the latter's return to Seoul in the late 1960s, when he no longer had access to the equipment in Utah.

³³ Although Lee is listed as a consultant at Rocketdyne on various grant applications, I have not been able to find any record of his work as a consultant among his personal documents.

³⁴ This was a common pattern for other students as well, with many of the Koreans holding positions in Korea, to be taken up immediately after graduation. Whether these positions required any administrative duties during graduate study remains uncertain.

³⁵ Taiwan also accepted aid under Atoms for Peace, beginning its program in the late 1950s.

³⁶ See the first volume of Jhon 1982 for the complete series of Korean publications.

³⁷ Eyring offered this praise to Jhon both publicly in the introduction to Jhon's collected papers and in numerous private letters of recommendation.

³⁸ By this point, the body of the theory had been fleshed out and the team members were codifying it and defending it against rival theories.

³⁹ These would include water, heavy water, and liquid oxygen.

⁴⁰ Jhon was apparently weighing whether or not to return to South Korea full-time. From his letters at the time, it appears that he did so with great reluctance, as he might easily have obtained an American faculty appointment.

⁴¹ Advertisements concerning KIST circulated in Korean-language newspapers in the United States, but a good part of the recruiting was also conducted through networks of ethnic Koreans living and working there.

⁴² Sogang College recruited several of these Wisconsin PhDs to build its biology department in the mid-1960s.

⁴³ Both Eyring and Lee made numerous trips to South Korea to maintain their network of relationships.

⁴⁴ The earliest deal with a petroleum multinational took place in 1962, but South Korea did not begin to develop its own processing facilities until at least the early 1970s.

⁴⁵ I am only tracing Lee's adoption of this rhetoric from Eyring, but in fact, it can be traced back to his period in Kyoto.