Correcting Life through the Marketplace? Genome Editing and the Commercialization of Academic Research in South Korea

Abstract

This article follows the scientific and entrepreneurial career of one of the most prominent genetic engineers, Jin-Soo Kim, in order to analyze the fate of a vision of biotechnology in South Korea, in which academy, government, and industry came together to “correct” Korean academic and economic life. I show how the scientific and the economic were intertwined in Kim’s entrepreneurial lives, and so were the public and the private, commerce and law and virtue. As the founder of Toolgen, a biotech company specializing in genome editing, Kim built his career as a pioneer in biotech venture from the late 1990s, at a time when the Korean government tried to find certain opportunities in biotechnology amid the Asian financial crisis. I situate Kim’s early career as a CEO of Toolgen and his return to an academic post at Seoul National University (SNU) within the rise of biotechnology entrepreneurship and the institutionalization of academic patenting in South Korea as an alternative to catch-up industrial and innovation policy that would free the country from the dependence that its own lack of science and technological innovation imposed on it. By 2005, as I show, Kim had emerged as an exemplary entrepreneurial scientist at SNU, a role model for reforming an old, tradition-bound research university into an entrepreneurial university, thereby helping to transform South Korea’s industrial economy into a knowledge economy in an age of globalization. The fate of Toolgen and the scientific career of Kim, however, reflected the emergence of biotechnology entrepreneurship not only of perceived opportunity but of considerable resentments. I will end this paper with a brief discussion of a recent controversy over the ownership of his invention of the CRISPR technology at SNU. His story is thus a vista of the new ideas and sentiments of the 21^st century global biotechnology manifested in South Korea.

Keywords:

• Genome editing
• biotechnology entrepreneurship
• South Korea
• intellectual property
• scientific virtue
• commercialization

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those who attended presentations of this paper at the 2018 Workshop, “Technologies of Life,” held at Seoul National University, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, the 2019 Korean Society for the History of Science Meeting, and the 2019 History of Science Meeting, for asking insightful questions. I especially appreciate enlightening comments and useful suggestions from Jane Calvert, Angela Creager, Michael Gordin, Kyoryen Hwang, Haesung Jee, Kiheung Kim, Wen-Hua Kuo, Lisa Onaga, Buhm Soon Park, Jenny Reardon, Miguel Garcia-Sancho, Hallam Stevens, Jae-Young Yun, and the anonymous referees for EASTS. This work was supported by the Creative-Pioneering Researchers Program through Seoul National University.

Notes

¹ Korean Association of Genome Editing, The KAGE Founding Symposium, 14 December 2016.

² Director and Professor, Jin-Soo Kim, “Genome Engineering Laboratory,” Department of Chemistry, SNU. http://gel.snu.ac.kr/ (last accessed, august 2020).

³ Samsung Medical Center (1998), 1997 Annual Report (June 1998).

⁴ Samsung Biomedical Research Institute (2001). Samsung SBRI Annual Report, 1998-2000.

⁵ Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB) established as a center for genetic engineering in 1985 as a government research institute and then relocated to the Deadeok Valley in 1990.

⁶ “Korean Venture Firm Develops New Gene Function Diagnostic Tool,” Maeil Economy, June 25 (2000).

⁷ Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, 21st-Century Frontier R&D; Traces of a Decade. Center for R&D Performance Support, 2010.

⁸ Korean Ministry of Education, Comprehensive Report on the Priority Promotion of Science and Engineering Graduate Programs (The Priority Promotion of Science and Engineering Graduate Programs, 2000) became a foundational guide for the BK21 and World Class University Projects.

⁹ “Market Insight: K-Unicon and Venture Capital Series, 3. Toolgen and LB Investment,” The Korea Economic Daily, 3 May 2018.

¹⁰ “Shareholder Revolt: Opposition to Company’s Owner,” Economy Chosun, 1 August 2006.

¹¹ “Market Insight: K-Unicon and Venture Capital Series, 3. Toolgen and LB Investment.”

¹² “Method of the Year 2011” Nature Methods 9 (2012): 1.

¹³ The IBS conducted an internal audit of Kim’s Genome Correction Research Group, pointing out critical issues of conflicts of interest between Kim’s research and the business of Toolgen from 2014–2016. 2016 IBS General Audit Report. 27 April 2017.

¹⁴ “The Business of DNA-cutting Genetic Scissor Technology,” The Digital Times, 11 January 2011.

¹⁵ Feng Zhang won a broad US patent on CRISPR-Cas9: Feng Zhang (inventor), “CRISPR-Cas9 Systems and Methods for Altering Expression of Gene Products,” US Patent #8,697,359. Filed on 15 October 2013. Granted on 15 April 2014.

¹⁶ In 2016, Toolgen received approval in its ownership of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in Australia.

¹⁷ The Invention Disclosure by Jin-Soo Kim to SNU R&D Foundation, 7 November 2012. Document provided to Byeon Ji-min by the Office of Democratic Party Lawmaker Park Yong-jin.

¹⁸ “Charges against the Patenting and the Transfer of the Ownership of CRISPR invention,” Dong-a Science, 27 May 2020.

¹⁹ “Toolgen Reached an Agreement with SNU Regarding Its Genome Editing Invention,” Chosun Biz, 25 September 2019.

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Doogab Yi

Doogab Yi is Associate Professor in the Department of Science Studies at Seoul National University. His broad research interests lie in the intersection between science and capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries, and he is currently working on several projects related to the development of science and technology within the context of capitalism, such as the history of biotechnology, the relationship between science and the law, and the emergence of the technologies of the 24/7 self. He is the author of The Recombinant University (University of Chicago Press, 2015).