President Noh Taewoo is a high-school graduate only, but a self-educated fully certified lawyer, specializing in labor and human rights. He's a protege of former president Kim Taejoong, who limps rather badly from the beatings he endured under the bad old days military dictatorships. Korean politics is (are?) fiery, contentious, and mud-slinging to the extreme. There's also a long history of straight-up old-fashioned corruption and nepotism that's diminished somewhat recently but will take a long time to get rid of. Further, Noh faces opposition parties, particularly the Minjoo party, which includes the old guard anti-communistic pro-US capitalist bunch. They consider Noh and his group with their sunshine policy to be virtually a communist (where 'communist' doesn't have much to do with Marx but denotes lack of sufficient hostility towards the north). Noh and Kim have built a much more progressive country - their general political atmosphere right now is more liberal than the US - but there is a balancing act. If he's perceived as going too far, the opposition will move in a flash and pounce on him. A case in point, a friend of my wife's, Han Myoungsook, was recently appointed prime minister, a position in Korea that is something like a strong vice-president. In order to assure confirmation she has had to renounce her political party affiliation (with Noh's party, the New Our Party) and keep her Quaker religion hidden.

After all that, I'm inclined to think Noh does believe the Kaesung development is a thin wedge to change the north, but he's forced to do it in a way that keeps the old guard sort of happy. It's a very tough job. Even tougher than Bush's job.

Yes, I think I should, eh?

sort of a typical robber baron/king attitude. South Korea tried that for a while, too, with the top level of capitalists doing very well indeed, and eventually they lost power while that sort of behavior is now viewed as reprehensible and harmful, whereas in the past it was excused as being necessary to the development of a poor country. It's the sort of detachment we see here, symbolized by a bumper sticker a good many friends of mine use: "War is not the answer". To which my response is, that depends on what your question is. If your question is, how can my friends and I make a pile of money while making the bellicose right happy, keeping fear levels high, and grabbing some mid-east real estate, then war is indeed the answer. Kim Jongil likely has some similar outlook on the world.

back-and-forth a lot on the idea of 'race' - from, 'race is not a biologic construct' to 'it's all about health care disparities' to 'you can't argue genetics'. Certainly one can't argue with the wealth of literature on the (genetic) health problems of the Ashkenazi Jews, but what about prostate cancer in US black men? Is it a biologic or health care difference; should we even look? So, we are, Kaiser Permanente's big California research divisions are running a long term study on the questions.

On the other hand, there're plenty of examples where there's been nothing biologic creating the difference, much to our collective chagrin and shame. One example I heard that was used every year in teaching first year med students at the institution where I was on faculty went like this: before the days of very rapid pregnancy testing, black women had a much higher mortality rate from ectopic pregancy than white women. When this was investigated, here's what came out. Beginning docs were taught that black women were at higher risk of pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), a sort of ultimate bad outcome of a history of sexually transmitted diseases. The symptoms are very like ectopic pregnancy, but the treatment, a good whallop of antibiotics, is obviously much different. So, what was happening was that women would show up at the ER with severe lower abdominal/pelvic pain, fever, etc. If the woman was white, the doc would immediately test for pregnancy and start treatment for ectopic pregnancy even before the pregnancy test came back (days later). If the woman was black, the doc would assume PID and start treatment for that, albeit doing the pregnancy test - but by the time the positive pregnancy test came back and the misdiagnosis became obvious, it was too late to save the patient's life. Fortunately, this went away with, not changing attitudes, but rapid pregnancy tests.

about this. So, yes, good news, but both the doubt and our collective reaction says much, none of it good, about the state of our nation - and not just the political leaders (or whatever you want to call them).

From another angle, it's about time. I went to grad school with Laura Koutsky, early to mid 80s - we even had adjacent carrels. The association of HPV with cervical cancer was her PhD thesis and has been a large part of her career since. She was primarily responsible for getting this out there as a causal association; perhaps as much as Sir Richard Doll with lung cancer and cigarettes. I'd like to see her get some sort of major recognition sometime, but epidemiologists never seem to get nominated for Nobels.

You do realize Woonjae Lee is coming with the Korean team, right?