Park Jong sei

Early career

A graduate of Seoul University's Department of Chemistry, Park moved to the United States for higher studies in 1966, where he attended graduate school at the University of Rochester and did postdoctoral research at Georgetown University before joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. He later naturalised as a U.S. citizen and worked for the government of Maryland's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Park moved back to South Korea in 1986, where he served as head of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology's Applied Sciences Division. He resumed his original South Korean citizenship and renounced U.S. citizenship in 1996 before joining the Food and Drug Administration, as South Korea did not permit dual citizenship at the time.

In his capacity at KIST, Park was involved with drug testing at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul as head of the Olympic Doping Control Center. There, he was responsible for the detection of stanozolol in urine samples from Ben Johnson which resulted in the latter being stripped of his gold medal. Park took great care in performing the urinalysis, and even repeated the test procedure from scratch to be entirely sure of his results before reporting the sample to International Olympic Committee officials; he did not find out to whom the sample belonged until days later, as the samples were not labelled by name per standard procedure. ABC World News named him "Person of the Week" on 30 September 1998 for his role in bringing the scandal to light. He also detected marijuana usage by three athletes, though no action was taken against them as marijuana was not a banned performance-enhancing substance. Park clashed with Olympics officials over other aspects of how he did his job, and made angry comments to the Washington Post about false samples with trace amounts of banned substances which had been planted among genuine samples in his lab.

As head of the Food and Drug Administration

Park was appointed head of the Food and Drug Administration in March 1998. His appointment came as a surprise to observers, as he was a scientist in what was typically viewed as a political position. In his new capacity, he conducted a shake-up of the administration, replacing seven long-serving officers and recruiting more than 40 new scientists from South Korea and overseas. Park's disregard for earlier seniority-based promotion procedures elicited opposition from the bureaucracy, and the Chosun Ilbo reported that some disgruntled anti-reformists in the administration had made anonymous denunciations to prosecutors about Park's alleged receipt of bribes, resulting in an investigation of him just months after he was appointed to his new position.

In January 1999, Park was arrested on bribery charges, with prosecutors stating that for several years beginning in 1992, a local pharmaceutical company executive had paid him ₩185 million in bribes for his aid in getting the company's drugs approved. Park's arrest was part of President Kim Dae-jung's crackdown on corruption in the medical industry, and was followed in February by the arrest of Park's director-general of pharmaceutical safety Kim Yon-pan. Park was convicted on the charges and sentenced to three years in prison and five years of probation. He served roughly two years of his sentence, and was released in 2000.

Later career

In 2002, Park founded Lab Frontier, a biotechnology start-up which collaborated with Ewha Womans University on protein microarray development. He also later became president of the Bio Venture Association. In November 2007, he was arrested on fraud charges relating to alleged falsification of pharmaceuticals trial reports used to get regulatory approval for pharmaceuticals, on the basis of a tip from a paid informant which led to indictments of 22 other researchers.

Selected publications