Short bio for ISCB 2008 Toronto
From Jongbhak.com
Jong Bhak became interested in bioinformatics in the 2nd grade of high school when the first 8-bit PCs became available.
He realized that life was too short to enjoy mathematics, physics, veterinary medicine, and philosophy, so he decided to solve the human ageing problem in order to live longer and work on them later, and chose to do vet medicine.
Disappointed by a university eduction system and general corruption in Seoul, he went to Aberdeen University (Zoology), Scotland, in 1990. He found that scientific training was not rigorous enough to make students to build up scientific problem solving process from the first or fundamental principles. He realized that basic knowledge should be examined in any field to synthesize new paradigms. He changed his subject to biochemistry in 1993.
He then went to work with Tim Hubbard and Cyrus Chothia in Cambridge, UK, doing his thesis on genome analyses.
He is probably the first person who wrote his entire Ph.D. thesis on-line openfreely with an HTML composer in UNIX machines.
Traumatized by the unethical practices by some colleagues and other scientists who steal, refuse to recognize others’ work, and play academic sportsmen to win medals, he lost much of his passion in science as a collaborative group intellectual and felt bitter toward racist, discriminatory, unpleasant scientific community under a global blanket of hypocracy.
He then went to Boston to work with George Church. He realized that microarray data were not precise enough (1998) and went back to EBI, Cambridge, UK, to work with Liisa Holm on protein interaction. Liisa's group was very good with great colleagues.
Later he took a group leader position at MRC-DUNN, Cambridge. He met brilliant colleagues there and completed some work on ‘interactome’.
He returned to Korea as a professor at KAIST but found even worse ethical problems as exemplified by Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk,and left to become the director of the Korean Bioinformation Center in 2005, working with about 50 researchers.
He regards himself a researcher but not a scientist anymore.
He has been working on providing philosophical foundations in doing biology through projects such as biojustice.org, omics.org, genomics.org, and biosophy.org. He has also begun farming fruit trees on a small island in the south of Korea.
He realized that life was too short to enjoy mathematics, physics, veterinary medicine, and philosophy, so he decided to solve the human ageing problem in order to live longer and work on them later, and chose to do vet medicine.
Disappointed by a university eduction system and general corruption in Seoul, he went to Aberdeen University (Zoology), Scotland, in 1990. He found that scientific training was not rigorous enough to make students to build up scientific problem solving process from the first or fundamental principles. He realized that basic knowledge should be examined in any field to synthesize new paradigms. He changed his subject to biochemistry in 1993.
He then went to work with Tim Hubbard and Cyrus Chothia in Cambridge, UK, doing his thesis on genome analyses.
He is probably the first person who wrote his entire Ph.D. thesis on-line openfreely with an HTML composer in UNIX machines.
Traumatized by the unethical practices by some colleagues and other scientists who steal, refuse to recognize others’ work, and play academic sportsmen to win medals, he lost much of his passion in science as a collaborative group intellectual and felt bitter toward racist, discriminatory, unpleasant scientific community under a global blanket of hypocracy.
He then went to Boston to work with George Church. He realized that microarray data were not precise enough (1998) and went back to EBI, Cambridge, UK, to work with Liisa Holm on protein interaction. Liisa's group was very good with great colleagues.
Later he took a group leader position at MRC-DUNN, Cambridge. He met brilliant colleagues there and completed some work on ‘interactome’.
He returned to Korea as a professor at KAIST but found even worse ethical problems as exemplified by Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk,and left to become the director of the Korean Bioinformation Center in 2005, working with about 50 researchers.
He regards himself a researcher but not a scientist anymore.
He has been working on providing philosophical foundations in doing biology through projects such as biojustice.org, omics.org, genomics.org, and biosophy.org. He has also begun farming fruit trees on a small island in the south of Korea.
Jong’s research interests are geronto-genomics, mapping the whole universe as an organism, biouniverse, establishing a computable philosophy, biosophy, and building a fully automatic bioinformatics engine, bioengine.
He supports the free exchange of bioinformation, such as personal genome information, as it is the essence of human beings, being one of the supporters of ‘free genomics’ or ‘$0 genomics’ to build a free depository and analysis server of the genomes for all humans.
He has published a few worth reading papers in the past 15 years. His home page is www.jongbhak.com.
