Digitally preserving Vietnamese relics

Koreans help restore site in Vietnam

HUE, Vietnam ― The summer sun heated the air up to 45 degrees Celsius (113F) recently as a group of young Koreans busily took pictures of a large, deteriorating building. The heat also continued to take its slow toll on the structure, which sported peeling paint and rotting wood beneath its yellow-tiled roof.
The Throne Palace is one of the few buildings standing today within Hue, the Imperial City, which served as capital of Vietnam from 1802 to 1945 and as home to the emperor and royal family. Eighty percent of the Imperial City grounds have been destroyed by foreign attacks in various wars. Today, only a few buildings remain, still bearing the scars of conflict.
The city of Hue has been designated as a World Cultural Heritage site, but a lack of monetary and human resources are delaying the professional preservation of the existing structures, let alone the restoration of the demolished ones.
Park Jin-ho, a researcher at the Graduate School of Culture and Technology of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and his teammates have been working to digitally preserve the site. The 11 team members include a mix of scientists, technicians and a photographer.
They are also cultural envoys, as this is the first project that the Korean government has undertaken to help preserve cultural relics in foreign countries.
The project is mainly being funded by the Cultural Heritage Foundation, which provided 100 million won ($106,000). Kaist provided 20 million won, but the money does not include the expensive equipment the team is using, such as digital 3D scanners. The project is also supported by the Korean National Commission for Unesco.
The team is basically taking both two- and three-dimensional images of the site and reconstructing the building in a three-dimensional format.
“We’re rebuilding the building in a virtual space,” said Ahn Jae-hong, one of the Kaist researchers working on the project.
There is plenty of work to do.
In 1968 American forces bombed the area when North Vietnamese troops had taken over the citadel; the monuments were also destroyed by the French in 1947 and various battles in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the Vietnamese rose up against France, then its colonial ruler. The structures that survived were weathered by typhoons, floods and other natural disasters.
“This is a new kind of diplomatic approach ― a cultural one, which makes it very high on the strategic ladder of international exchanges,” said Kim Kui-bae, an official at the Korean National Commission for Unesco. This local body for Unesco suggested the Vietnamese site to the government.
“It is very meaningful because Vietnam and Korea have a strong his-toric relationship,” Kim said. “Also, we don’t think of this project as a charity to help developing countries. It is part of the greater global initiative to restore cultural relics, which are an important asset for everyone.”
Ahn, of the Kaist team, agreed.
“In the past, the foreign support offered by Korea was mainly medical work or building social infrastructure, such as roads. But since Korea is strong in information technology, we are now trying to reach out with the technological edge we have,” Ahn said.
The Vietnam-run Hue Monuments Conservation Center has offered its support, allowing the Korean team to work around-the-clock on the site, giving them full access to restricted areas. The center is also providing the team with past documents and maps to help with the digital reconstruction.
This project is not part of a $70 million, 15-year project the Vietnamese government launched in 1996 to restore some of the main structures, but since restoration efforts have only just begun, the digital documentation of the site and cyber rendering of the demolished buildings will assist future restoration efforts, an HMCC spokeswoman said.
The Korean team plans to visit the site two more times this year and they hope to finish the project by December.
When the digital rendering is complete, the Koreans will set up an installation at the actual site, with huge monitors.
Visitors will then be able to see what the building looked like in 2007 and what it looked like in its prime.
The Kaist team is now working on recomposing the digital images.
“People will be able to see what the site looked like through projectors and screens, which will give them an idea of the splendor of the past,” said Ahn Mi-hye, a researcher at Kaist’s digital media contents lab and the only woman on the team. “The field work was extremely exhausting because of the heat, but it is fulfilling to be working on a project that has a special purpose.”

By Wohn Dong-hee
Staff Writer for JoongAng Daily

Soybean paste can help prevent diabetes

Cheonggukjang, a pungent fermented soybean paste, is effective in preventing diabetes, according to the Korea Food Research Institute. The paste is made by fermenting boiled soybeans in a warm place. The fermented beans are then usually incorporated into stews or soups.

The institute said that through joint studies with professors at Hoseo University, scientists discovered that cheonggukjang produces elements that are essential in preventing diabetes. The team, led by scientist Kwon Dae-young, said that as cheonggukjang ferments, it produces polyphenol ― an element that has cancer preventing and anti-oxidant characteristics ― as well as various functional peptides. In particular, the fermentation increases the levels of several types of bean proteins.

The researchers fed cheonggukjang to lab mice with diabetes for eight weeks, and noted that insulin output was stimulated and that the pancreas induced the multiplication of beta cells, which are important in secreting insulin. The cheonggukjang also boosted the increase of a protein called PPAR, which improves insulin’s ability to absorb sugar.
The results were reported in the U.S. journal “Process Biochemistry.”

“We have scientifically proven the excellence of traditional fermented foods and laid down a scientific evidence for marketing the food worldwide,” Kwon said.

By Wohn Dong-hee  for JoongAng Daily

[IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW]Doctor fights for global health and rights

Every year, three million people die from HIV/AIDS, 10 times the toll of the Asian tsunami disaster. Yet Kim Jim-yong, a professor at Harvard Medical School, believes that most of these people could have been saved by doing what was considered revolutionary just a short time ago: providing treatment to people with HIV/AIDS in the developing world.
After serving three years as the director of the HIV/AIDS unit at the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Kim returned to Harvard University, where he was appointed as the Director of the Francoix-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights last month. He is also the chairman of the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine and chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
In an interview with the JoongAng Daily, Dr. Kim said that the center will make a major commitment to addressing the problems of children living in poverty, focusing on AIDS orphans and vulnerable children. “In the next few months we will become involved in several initiatives that hold great promise for enhancing efforts to provide more and more appropriate services to poor children, especially those affected by HIV/AIDS,” he said.
While major figures such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Microsoft Corp.’s founder Bill Gates have been attracting public attention to HIV and AIDS by raising millions of dollars to fight the disease around the world, Dr. Kim’s battle began long ago in more humble settings.
Dr. Kim began AIDS treatment in 1987 when he co-founded a nonprofit organization called Partners in Health with his friend Paul Farmer from Harvard Medical School. Working on a tiny budget, he began providing treatment and health care for people with tuberculosis and HIV in poor countries such as Haiti and Peru, using antiretroviral drugs. His efforts were very successful. Earlier this year, Dr. Kim was selected as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people.
“I’ve always been interested in developing countries and even when I was a very young child, I was very curious about what was happening in places like Bangladesh or other very poor countries. I was committed to doing something about poverty and inequality since I was about 10 years old and it was only later in my college career that I decided that I would work on this problem through medicine,” Dr. Kim said.
He said that the transition from being a TB expert to an HIV/AIDS effort was not overly difficult, as the two diseases are very closely linked. “Indeed, if one is an expert on one of the two diseases, it is impossible to ignore the other, especially if you work in Africa,” he said.
Born in Seoul, Dr. Kim was raised in Muscatine, Iowa, as one of only two Asian families in the region. He completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University and went on to Harvard Medical School, later receiving a Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard.
“Anthropology affects everything I do and in fact, I ‘do’ anthropology every day. Anthropologists are students of human beings and the world they create. We do ethnography, which is deep analysis of culture, psychology, social structure and other things in real life. These skills have been useful in so many different ways in all the fields in which I have worked,” he said.
While director of the HIV/AIDS unit at WHO, Dr. Kim spearheaded a program that set a global goal on AIDS treatment for the first time in history. Dubbed the “3 by 5 program” to treat three million people in five years, WHO was unable to reach the goal during his tenure, but Dr. Kim said that the important thing was to set the goal in the first place.
“There were many things that could have been done more effectively so that we could have reached 3 by 5. More efficient and effective procurement and supply management of drugs, more decentralized approaches to treatment delivery, utilization of community health workers and just more political will to reach the target,” he said. “The most important impact of 3 by 5 was that for the first time, a UN agency set a concrete target in the fight against AIDS and then both counted and announced the results for all the world to see. We held countries responsible for responding to the epidemic and I think this was very important.”
When asked about his opinion on Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gates’ hopes to cure AIDS in the future with vaccines, Dr. Kim said he is not very optimistic about vaccines in particular, but encouraged by the fact that both Mr. Gates and Mr. Clinton are engaged in working on the problem. “I am very optimistic that both of them can make huge contributions to the fight against AIDS and I think that their involvement and the involvement of other powerful, famous and wealthy people is a very important development in our efforts, not only for AIDS but for human development and poverty alleviation as a whole.”
Dr. Kim attributes much of his self-development to his parents.
“My father was very influential in encouraging me to study medicine and use medicine as a way of having an impact on society. He wanted me to be a physician but he also encouraged me to try new areas. He was very happy that I was studying anthropology and encouraged me to go to Korea to do my doctoral dissertation work. My mother is a philosopher and theologian and has had a huge impact on how my thinking has evolved over the years. There’s nothing I do that hasn’t been affected in some way by her influence. She encouraged all of her children to think deeply about the moral and ethical,” he said.
Dr. Kim said that those moral and ethical values are important in approaching the HIV/AIDS problem.
“Not caring about the fate of others is bad for the person, the family, the country and the world. Compassion for others is one of the reasons that humans survived and other species died out and it is in fact what every religious tradition instructs us to do,” he said. “But also, entire economies in Africa and Asia could collapse under the weight of AIDS and that would hurt all other economies and peoples in the world.”
Although the number of people with HIV in Korea has tripled in the past five years, Dr. Kim said that he does not have any plans in the near future to conduct any projects that involve Korea. “When you triple a very low number, it’s still a very low number,” he said.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about his mother country. At heart, he is still very much Korean. “I enjoy karaoke but I’m very bad at it. I guess I’m very Korean after all,” he said.by Wohn Dong-hee

Flower bush shrunk by scientists

Korean scientists have used radiation to shrink the size of mugunghwa bushes in half.
The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute said yesterday it developed a new species of mugunghwa, the national flower of Korea, using gamma radioactive waves to alter the genes in the species “Hongdansim No. 2.” After three years of cultivation tests, the new species was recently registered by the National Seed Management Office.
Named “kkoma,” meaning “little kid,” the 5-year-old mutated mugunghwa bush can grow to 50 cm (19.6 inches) in height, making it easier to tend indoors than the full-sized bush. The flowers and leaves are also half the size of regular mugunghwa.
The institute manages some 200 genetic sources of Korean and foreign mugunghwa to develop new species. Before “kkoma,” however, changes were mostly in the color or size of the flower.
“We will use the radiation to develop new species of Korean plants for floricultural and landscaping purposes,” said Kang Si-yong, a researcher on the radiation project.
Mugunghwa is known in the West as the Rose of Sharon. The flowers, which grow on a bush, can be found nationwide.

by Wohn Dong-hee