The transnational move of interdisciplinarity: Ginseng and the beginning of neuroscience in South Korea, 1970–1990s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Neuroscience did not suddenly become a global endeavor. This article examines the way neuroscience took shape in South Korea focusing on Chan-Woong Park, who launched the Korean Society for Neuroscience in 1992. Park was a pharmacologist who studied ginseng and the brain from the 1970s. By revealing the way Park noted both opportunity and difficulty in the interdisciplinarity of neuroscience, this article reveals the context in which interdisciplinarity shaped studies of the brain in South Korea. To date, historians have followed the flow of knowledge, embedded in materials or instruments, to understand the transnational development of science and technology. This article focuses on the flow of value—interdisciplinarity, per se—which mediated uncertainties in studying the brain and galvanized ignorance in the name of neuroscience. By revealing the materiality and locality of interdisciplinarity and its role in facilitating ignorance, the article sheds new light on the transnational development of neuroscience.