An American Odyssey

About the Book

This is the story of a Korean-American woman scientist, who was born in Korea and went through two wars (World War II and the Korean War) and two revolutions (the Student Revolution in 1960 and the Military Revolution in 1961) and eventually became a medical school professor in America. She managed to attend the top school in spite of financial hardship in a war-ravaged country and eventually won a scholarship for her graduate study in the United States. After completing a series of postdoctoral training fellowships in biochemistry and immunology in many of the country's most prestigious institutions, she became a medical school professor and taught and trained many medical and graduate students for nearly two decades. During these years, she has also developed programs and carried out highly acclaimed research in cancer biology. She went on to industry, after two decades of academic research career. In industry, she developed the cardiac Troponin-I test for the early diagnosis of a heart attack -- a diagnostic test that is in use worldwide. After marriage to one of her colleagues, Professor Gerald Shklar of Harvard Dental School, she returned to academia on a part-time basis and worked to develop various tropical plant materials into medical/cosmetic preparations. She then decided to write this memoir, called An American Odyssey. This story tells of the struggles of a young foreign-born oriental woman who strives to survive in the medical sciences profession in the 70s through the end of the last century in America. Despite the insurmountable odds against her, it was still possible that a sinngle oriental woman could achieve a reasonable degree of success, which, no place on earth other than America, would offer.

About the Author

BSc in Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy, Seoul National University, Soeul, Korea. M.N.S. in Nutritional Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Ph.D in Biochemistry, UNiversity of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Asst. - Assoc. - Adjuncy Professor in Microbiology, Boston University, School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts. Senior Staff Scientist, Ciba Corp., Walpole, Massachusetts Senior Research Scientis, Mass. Inst. Tech.