“Medicine on a Global Scale”: Interview with Jaehwan Hyun
- Traduction(s) :
- Médecine à l’échelle du monde : Entretien avec Jaehwan Hyun [fr]
Notes de l’auteur
The “Medicine on a Global Scale” series of interviews features researchers from a variety of backgrounds, with the aim of highlighting current works into the global history of medicine and health from the fifteenth century to the present day. By combining different points of view, it opens a window on to the questions, perspectives and debates that are currently driving this dynamic field, which is itself globalised. In order to provide access to the widest possible readership, all the interviews are published both in French and English.
Texte intégral
1Jaehwan Hyun is an Associate Professor at Pusan National University, South Korea. He specialises in the history of human genetic and racial science in South Korea in the twentieth century, with particular attention to its colonial (1910-1945) and postcolonial relations with Japan and the United States. His current research includes the history of environmental conservation science and trans-Asian scientific diplomacy during the Cold War.
Shiori Nosaka (SN): What led you to research the history of science, technology and biology in transnational contexts?
- 1 In this article, all references to East Asian names indicate surnames first, followed by given name (...)
Jaehwan Hyun (JH): When I began my dissertation project on the history of human genetics and the politics of national identity in Korea from the 1920s, I came across the case of Na Sejin 1(1908-1984), who is known as the founder of South Korean physical anthropology. He graduated from the Keijō Imperial University Medical School in 1932 under the Japanese colonial regime (1910-1945), and received his doctoral degree in 1942. He went on to become a professor in the Department of Anatomy at Seoul National University College of Medicine. One of his lifelong subjects was the physical characteristics of Koreans. The historiography of Na Sejin’s work has long been that his research was pseudoscience based on the false colonial racial science he had learned from Japanese teachers. In contrast, post-war Korean physical anthropology was said to have finally overcome this racial science by learning evolutionary anthropology from Seoul medical staff who had been retrained for one or two years at the University of Minnesota after the Korean War in 1953. This ‘Americanisation narrative’ excluded Na Sejin’s racial research from the story of the retraining programme. This struck me as odd. Na had also benefited from the programme to study in Minnesota, and had met many American physical anthropologists during his stay in the United States. Meanwhile, I was studying the postwar history of genetics and race in the United States, and I learned that many American anthropologists and geneticists wanted to retain race as a category of research into the postwar period. Contrary to what Korean historiography assumes, therefore, I cannot consider postwar physical anthropology in the United States as an objective or anti-racist science in contrast to Japanese colonial racial science. I began to believe that it was impossible to understand Na’s postwar research programme without tracing the circulation of people, knowledge, methods and materials between Japan, Korea and the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond. In this way, my doctoral dissertation and postdoctoral projects took a transnational approach.
SN: Could you tell us about the most important intellectual and historiographical influences that have shaped your work?
JH: I can identify four influences. First, when I was a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Programme in History and Philosophy of Science at Seoul National University, Professor Lim Jongtae taught us to revisit colonial Korean science and technology so that we would be able to better understand the history of postwar South Korea. Lee Jung’s work on colonial collaboration between Japanese and Korean botanists also pushed me to look at postwar interactions between Korean and Japanese geneticists. The second influence came from my colleague Miyagawa Takuya, who introduced me to Japanese historians of science such as Tsukahara Togo and Shin Chang-Geon. Their research on locating the history of Korean science within the history of the Japanese imperial universities made me think about the continuity or reconnection of such imperial networks in the postwar period. Third, Japanese historians, anthropologists and sociologists working on the history of genetics and race, such as Sakano Toru, Takezawa Yasuko, Oguma Eiji, Iida Kaori and Arnaud Nanta, convinced me that I had to look at the transnational connections between Japan and South Korea if I wanted to understand the history of human genetics in Korea. Finally, the global history of postwar human genetics led by ‘Western’ historians of biology such as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Staffan Müller-Wille convinced me that it was worthwhile to study the Korean history of human genetics from a transnational perspective. From 2009 to 2015, Veronika Lipphardt led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin called ‘Twentieth-century Histories of Knowledge about Human Variation.’ I spent a year at UCLA with a scholar from this group, Soraya de Chadarevian, while I finished my dissertation. She persuaded me that my work was valuable not only for the history of science in Korea, but also for the global history of human genetics in general, and made me aware of the vacuum of East Asian histories in the global history of human genetics narrative.
SN: Which sources do you use most in your work?
JH: I use the sources our profession generally uses, including scientific reports, papers, books, biographies, memoirs, government documents, institutional history books, popular magazines and correspondence. Oral history interviews are also very important in the South Korean context because it is quite difficult to use archival material here, especially when it comes to the history of science. Scientists’ personal papers, correspondence and publications are often thrown away when they retire. In this context, objects and physical copies of books provide important information. For example, in the collection of a certain geneticist in the archives of Hokka University in Japan, I found hundreds of paper cards hidden under a pile of other papers on a bookshelf recording information about the exchange of documents between this geneticist and others. Among these cards I found the ones relating to the work of his Korean students published in the 1950s. It offered strong evidence of their postwar interactions, even during the anti-Japanese Rhee Syngman regime’s control of information and exchanges between Korea and Japan. I have recently started a new research project on environmental science in Cold War Korea in which I look at how ornithologists from Japan and Korea–not only from South Korea but also from North Korea–interacted. I went to the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology in Abiko, Japan, where I found a book written by a North Korean ornithologist that had been kept in the library there. On the first page, I discovered that he had sent it to a Japanese ornithologist in August 1966, with greetings in Japanese. This material helps me understand their colonial ties, which continued even at the height of the Cold War.
Guillaume Linte (GL): One of your research topics is the anthropological and genetic study of race in Korea in colonial and postcolonial situations. What is the specificity of the Korean context with respect to this topic?
JH: Research on genetics and race was not just carried out by Korean scientists: it was actually part of a wider project to study the origins and history of the Japanese race. The knowledge and networks of researchers established during the colonial period were crucial, as South Korean geneticists and anthropologists sought to launch their own nation-building project in the postwar period. In the 1930s and 1940s, the local category of minjok [민족] in Korean or minzoku [民族] in Japanese became the category used by scientists – especially physical anthropologists and geneticists – to study the Korean population. Indeed, the historicity of minjok as a biological entity is crucial to understanding the specificity of the Korean context. Although it is a translation of the German word Volk, ‘nation’ is not the only possible English translation: this Korean term has been translated into English as nation, ethnicity and even race. Physical anthropology and genetics have played a crucial role in assigning various meanings to this local category. If we look at the activities of scientists in the 1930s and 1940s, we can see that many Japanese anthropologists and geneticists, as well as their Korean students mixed the idea of ethnicity and race with minzoku or minjok while using it as a biological notion. Many Korean historians or historians of Korea mistakenly believe that minjok or minzoku only means nation or ethnicity, but in human biological research such as physical anthropology and human genetics it has actually meant race. Even historians of science fail to understand this specificity. For instance, my supervisor and many Korean colleagues were very sceptical about my doctoral project, thinking that Koreans in general, and Korean scientists in particular, do not care about race because Korea is not a multiracial society. This misconception about the non-existence of ‘race’ in Korean society has hindered the historical study of anthropological and genetic science on race in South Korea.
GL: What role did scientists’ interpretation of blood groups play in the construction of national identities in Korea?
JH: A field of serological anthropology emerged in Imperial Japan in the 1920s that was very popular. One part of it was to find out the racial position of the Japanese compared to other populations around the world. This led to a lot of research on the South Korean population. A Department of Forensic Medicine was established within the medical school at Keijō Imperial University in colonial Korea, and a forensic scientist named Satō Takeo (1897–1959) was appointed to begin long-term fieldwork in the early 1930s to collect blood group samples and data throughout the Korean Peninsula. The blood group research was extended to Manchuria and other areas as the Japanese military moved forward. This research found great favour with the colonial government. There was an assimilation policy called naisen ittai [内鮮一体] or the unity of Japanese and Koreans, and the research showed a kind of biological continuity or proximity between the Japanese, Korean and Manchurian populations. This type of research disappeared after 1945, and until the 1960s no Korean scientists were doing serious research on blood groups. Suddenly, in the early 1960s, as the decolonisation movement moved south due to the diplomatic normalisation between South Korea and Japan, intensive research into the distribution of blood groups among South Koreans began, with the aim of proving that the distribution of Korean blood groups was quite different from that of neighbouring populations, especially the Japanese, and that the Korean nation could thus achieve true scientific independence from Japan. This kind of thinking and research is reflected in popular science literature, which emphasises the ethnic homogeneity of Koreans and the creation of a homogeneous national identity in post-war South Korea.
GL: How do you link your work to research on other geographical areas?
JH: My work shows how genetic research was linked through human networks and methodologies, particularly between the United States, Japan and South Korea. The typical story is that before 1945, race was a very fascinating subject of research for American anthropologists, scientists, and doctors. After 1945, however, race was pushed out of science because of Nazi scientific racism, especially in the United States. However, more and more scholars, such as Jenny Reardon and Lisa Gannett, are beginning to show that the concept of race itself did not disappear, particularly in the United States, but continued to be used under other names, such as population. Many historians of science, including Elise K. Burton, Projit Bihari Mukharji and Ricardo Roque, are also starting to show that racial science and racial research in genetics were common outside the United States. The persistence of racial science in genetics in the post-war world is also evident in South Korea. I recognise that my South Korean case study is part of this broader work to decentralise the America-centred narrative of genetics and race. I am also looking at how Japanese geneticists conducted trans-Asian research into Japanese genetic origins in the 1970s. These geneticists collaborated not only with South Korean researchers but also with Iranian colleagues, and their research contributed to the construction of national or racial identities in the three countries. Today, Elise K. Burton is working on the Japanese-Iranian interaction, while I am focusing on the South Korean-Japanese interaction. I believe that my research contributes to writing the interconnected history of postwar racial research in genetics across regional boundaries – between East Asia and the Middle East.
Martin Robert (MR): What do you have in mind for your future work?
JH: I have three main strands to my research at the moment. First, I am doing historiographical experiments with spatiality using the term ‘trans-Asia’ to show how the genetic research conducted by Japanese and Korean scientists has played a role in the construction and reconstruction of national identities in both countries. It is a way of moving away from the America-centred historiography and to see connections that I was not able to see when I focused on the trans-Pacific relations between Japan, South Korea and the United States. In terms of temporality, I am thinking about ‘transwar,’ to see how science, technology, medicine and even some public policies in the 1920s really connect to the 1960s and 1970s. It is a little different from approaches that emphasise colonial origins or legacies in science, because I do not structure my work around trying to divide before and after 1945. Building on these approaches to spatiality and temporality, I aim to write a book in English that expands on my dissertation and postdoctoral research in the near future. At present, I am finalizing a monograph in Korean that centers on the history of Korean genetic research through the framework of ‘race science.’ Second, I am pursuing a new interest in science diplomacy and the history of environmental science that I developed during my postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, in collaboration with Homei Aya and other colleagues at the Commission on Science, Technology and Diplomacy (STAND). Specifically, I am looking at how environmental conservation science and the related policy were shaped in Korea from a transnational perspective, particularly in the context of Cold War science diplomacy. Third, I am building collaborations among East Asian scholars by working with Homei Aya and Matsubara Yoko on the history of eugenics in Japan and South Korea, with Iida Kaori on trans-Asian science diplomacy in Japan and South Korea, and with Zhang Meng and Sumida Tomohisa on the history of barbers’ masks and the politics of hygiene in early twentieth-century Japan, colonial Korea and the Republic of China.
MR: What do you think of the idea of a ‘global’ history in your field? And what, in your view, are the merits and limitations of the studies that currently define themselves as global histories of science?
- 2 James Poskett, Horizons. A Global History of Science, London, Penguin Books, 2023; Jacob Darwin Ham (...)
JH: As I understand it, the global history of science has been proposed by numerous historians, who have emphasised the need to study the circulation of knowledge, goods and people across the globe. It is about understanding how modern science has been shaped and built by global flows, and is not just a ‘Western’ invention. I see many excellent monographs in our fields with ‘global’ in the subtitle, such as Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett, or The Wretched Atom. America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology by Jacob Darwin Hamblin.2 On the positive side, the rise of the global history of science has allowed historians like me who were not trained in the prestigious metropoles of the United States or Europe to have a voice in the international history of science community. This approach to history has allowed me to make my voice heard outside of South Korea, where I was trained. It seems to me, however, that the global history of science is often pursued in the form of additions to the main ‘Western’ history rather than as a serious engagement with the history of science outside the ‘West.’ For example, in the context of the history of science in East Asia, Japanese imperialism is a key element in the emergence of modern science, technology, medicine and related political dynamics in the region, but it is often omitted from the narrative of the overall history of science. Modern science appears as a kind of sea made up of the currents of different civilisations. What we need, in my view, are more interconnected histories. Perhaps we should start at the regional level, even if this implies the use of certain regional categories that are anachronistic or that have come from abroad: American regional studies, for example, insisted on the notion of ‘Asia’ during the Cold War, giving it a new connotation. Nevertheless, this term can be a heuristic tool for writing an interconnected history of the different regions of the world, and thus move towards a truly global history.
Notes
1 In this article, all references to East Asian names indicate surnames first, followed by given names, according to East Asian conventions.
2 James Poskett, Horizons. A Global History of Science, London, Penguin Books, 2023; Jacob Darwin Hambling, The Wretched Atom. America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021.
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Martin Robert, Guillaume Linte et Shiori Nosaka, « “Medicine on a Global Scale”: Interview with Jaehwan Hyun », Histoire, médecine et santé [En ligne], 27 | été 2025, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2025, consulté le 14 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hms/10029 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1479q
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