Scientists who laid groundwork for Korea's scientific rise

On Sept. 24, 1966, some 200 scientists and engineers from 71 academic societies gathered at the old Press Center in central Seoul. A black-and-white photograph taken that day shows a banner written in Chinese characters announcing the founding of the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies (KOFST), with the national flag behind the lectern.

After the national anthem, the order of proceedings included a "Song for the Promotion of Science and Technology." Korea at the time had no ministry overseeing science, nor did it have a general law for promoting science and technology.

At the meeting, the participants adopted the federation's bylaws, elected Kim Yun-gi as its first president and approved a first-year plan that included pushing for a law to promote science and technology. They also adopted a petition urging the government to enact that law, improve conditions for scientists, support the building of a hall for the scientific community and create a government agency dedicated to science. Two were realized within seven months: The Science and Technology Promotion Act was enacted in January 1967, and the Ministry of Science and Technology was launched that April. Korea's system for governing science began in part as a request from scientists.

This year, KOFST celebrated its 60th anniversary.

I am the first mathematician and the second woman to lead the organization. A mathematician and mathematics educator may seem an unlikely person to speak for Korea's engineers, chemists and biologists, but that is the point: The federation exists so that science can speak with one voice across disciplines.

The closest counterpart abroad is perhaps the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Founded in 1848, AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society, with more than 120,000 members, and the publisher of the journal Science. However, the two organizations began from very different places. AAAS was the work of an American scientific community that was already growing and seeking to organize itself. KOFST, by contrast, started from scratch. It was founded in a country where the infrastructure of science had yet to be built, and it helped bring that infrastructure into existence. Their structures are different, too. Unlike AAAS, KOFST counts institutions rather than individuals as its members: some 600 academic societies, research institutes and companies, along with regional federations across Korea and associations of Korean scientists in 22 countries.

In 1966, the question was whether Korea could become a country capable of doing scientific research and putting it to use. Today, the issues the nation is dealing with are very different. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum technology and biotechnology have become matters of national security and terms of alliance. Export controls and supply chain realignment now reach into decisions once made in the laboratory.

Governments are responding with strategies, budgets and diplomacy, but there are things only scientists can provide.

First, independent expertise: Technology moves faster than the cycles of administration and elections. Policy needs a standing source of judgment from those who work at the bench, on the factory floor and in the classroom, gathered across disciplines and offered free of partisan or commercial interest. That is what the founders offered in 1966, and what the federation is attempting again now with the National Assembly and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology through a series of forums. The forums will conclude on April 21, 2027, the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the science ministry, with a vision for Korea's next 60 years of science and technology.

Second, lasting partnerships abroad: Agreements between governments are revised as administrations change; the trust between a Korean laboratory and its partners in Munich, Toronto or Houston accumulates over decades. Such relationships are built by researchers and their societies, not by ministries. In 1974, KOFST and the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association jointly convened a symposium in Seoul — that meeting is now counted as the first of what has become the annual U.S.-Korea Conference.

Third, trust: When science is discussed in the vocabulary of security and competition, it is easily drawn toward political and industrial agendas. The public trusts science only when scientists can speak about evidence in their own voice. This matters most for artificial intelligence (AI), where public confidence will depend less on what the technology can do than on whether people believe it is being developed with their interests in mind.

When KOFST set out its mission, it chose three principles: public interest, openness and trust. Its new vision, a people-centered future built together through science and technology, makes the same point. Winning a technology race matters but so does asking whose lives the technology will improve.

The vision to be declared next April should not belong to Korea alone. Many of the questions it will take up, such as how AI is changing the practice of research, how open science can coexist with research security and how to prepare the next generation of scientists, are shared by scientific communities everywhere. We invite our counterparts abroad to join that conversation.

Sixty years ago, Korean scientists told their government what the future would require. The task for the next 60 years is much the same — for the scientific community to offer direction, and to do so in the open.

Kwon Oh-nam is the president of the KOFST and a professor of mathematics education at Seoul National University.