Journalist
Park Sae-jin박세진
swatchsjp@ajupress.com
Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy
Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience.
"Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."
Latest by Park Sae-jin
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Common painkiller revives fading muscle protein in aging mice SEOUL, September 10 (AJP) - The arthritis painkiller meloxicam slowed muscle wasting in old mice by restoring a protein that muscles lose with age, researchers at two South Korean universities have found. Sarcopenia, the gradual loss of muscle mass and strength that comes with age, contributes to frailty, lost mobility, metabolic problems and higher death rates in older adults, the researchers wrote. The processes that drive it are still not fully understood, they added, which has held back the development of drugs that target it. Bae Gyu-un, a professor in Sookmyung Women's University's Division of Pharmacy, and Kang Jong-sun, a professor at Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, led the study, which was published online Aug. 12 in the journal Experimental & Molecular Medicine. The work focused on Cdon, a protein on the surface of muscle cells. Earlier research had shown that it helps muscle stem cells develop into mature muscle and keeps the connections between nerves and muscles stable, but its role in adult muscle and in aging had not been established. The team found that Cdon levels fall in aging human muscle, in people with sarcopenia and in patients with several muscle-wasting diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the nerve disease also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Across 891 human muscle samples from a public tissue database, lower Cdon went together with higher activity in genes linked to muscle breakdown and with smaller muscle fibers. Muscle cells from a 68-year-old donor carried far less of the protein than cells from a 17-year-old, and old mice showed a similar decline. Bae said in a statement released by Sookmyung Women's University on Monday that the team had confirmed the loss of Cdon as "a major indicator of muscle aging." To look for a way to bring Cdon back, the researchers engineered mouse muscle cells to give off light whenever the Cdon gene switched on. They then tested 2,485 drugs already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the screen singled out meloxicam as a potent activator of the gene. In lab dishes, the drug raised Cdon levels and helped both mouse and human muscle cells grow into larger fibers, including cells from the older donor. The benefit held only within a narrow range, as a dose 100 times higher than the most effective one began to kill cells. Young mice given the drug by mouth every day for two months built more leg muscle, gripped harder and ran farther than untreated mice. Their hearts, livers and kidneys showed no change in weight. The researchers then treated 16-month-old mice for 10 weeks. Untreated old mice kept losing weight over that period, while treated mice lost less and had slightly lower blood sugar. The treated older animals had stronger grips, and nerve signals reached their muscles faster. Their muscles were heavier, with thicker fibers and less scarring, and their livers stored less fat. The drug caused no signs of gut damage at the dose used. The researchers traced part of the muscle damage to cysteine, an amino acid that built up in the muscle and blood of old mice. Previously published data show the same rise in the blood of people with sarcopenia. When the team flooded muscle cells with cysteine, the cells produced less energy and more of the unstable oxygen molecules that damage tissue, a process known as oxidative stress. Meloxicam brought cysteine levels down in old mice and reduced that damage. Meloxicam switched on AMPK, an enzyme that serves as the cell's energy sensor, within five minutes of treatment. When the researchers blocked AMPK, most of the drug's boost to Cdon disappeared, and its protection of mitochondria, the structures that generate a cell's energy, was lost. The mice received 0.02 milligrams of meloxicam per kilogram of body weight each day. At that dose, the drug did not change muscle levels of prostaglandin E2, an inflammation signal that its painkilling action normally suppresses. The researchers said this made it unlikely that the muscle benefits came from the drug's usual painkilling effect. The paper discloses competing interests for Bae and Kang, which it says the two universities reviewed and approved under their conflict-of-interest policies. All of the animal experiments used male mice, and most measurements came from groups of seven or fewer animals. In human samples, the researchers showed an association between low Cdon and muscle decline rather than a direct cause. The authors wrote that they have not yet identified the molecule meloxicam acts on to switch on AMPK, and that the long-term effects and safety of chronic treatment still need study. Whether the same pathway can be restored in aging human muscle will require clinical evaluation, they wrote. Journal/Source: Experimental & Molecular Medicine Title: Meloxicam protects against muscle and metabolic decline in ageing through Cdon restoration and oxidative stress modulation Link/DOI: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42587039/ 2026-09-10 18:11:39 -
Uzbekistan, Serbia sign environment pact SEOUL, September 10 (AJP) - Environmental protection was written into the package of agreements that lifted relations between Uzbekistan and Serbia to a strategic partnership this week, giving formal shape to environmental contacts that had been building since last year. Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Aleksandar Vucic signed a joint declaration establishing the partnership in Belgrade on Tuesday, at the close of the Uzbek president's first official visit to Serbia. The two sides exchanged 20 bilateral documents covering transport, renewable energy, agriculture, digitalization, labor migration and environmental protection. Bilateral trade reached $41.9 million last year, a record, up 27 percent from $32.9 million in 2024, according to the Serbian Chamber of Commerce. Serbian exports of agricultural and food products to Uzbekistan rose 54.1 percent in the first seven months of this year. The Embassy of Uzbekistan in the Republic of Korea said the environmental track centers on three areas, which are sustainable forest management, biodiversity conservation and cooperation between universities working on climate and environmental science. Forestry is where Serbia has the most to offer. Its Second National Forest Inventory, carried out between 2018 and 2023, put the country's forests and forest land at 3,025,471 hectares, or 39 percent of its territory, an increase of about 5 percentage points over the inventory published in 2009. A large share of that land is privately held, and Serbian forestry authorities have spent years building management arrangements between the state and private owners. Uzbekistan is trying to expand its own tree cover under Yashil Makon, a national planting campaign launched in 2021 with a target of 200 million saplings a year. The government says more than 266 million were planted in 2025. Serbia has granted protected status to 460 natural sites. They include five national parks, 17 nature parks, 20 landscapes of outstanding features, 68 nature reserves, 309 natural monuments and three protected habitats, together covering 583,183 hectares, or about 6.6 percent of the country, according to the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River. The academic component centers on the Central Asian University of Environmental and Climate Change Studies, known as Green University, which Tashkent has positioned as the region's flagship environmental institution. It was created by presidential decree on May 31, 2023, and opened in Tashkent Region in February 2024, with instruction conducted in English. The opening drew the director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Grethel Aguilar, along with the environment ministers of all five Central Asian states. Uzbekistan wants to link the university with the University of Belgrade and the University of Novi Sad through joint degree programs, research projects and exchanges of students and faculty. The groundwork was laid in Samarkand in early June. Serbia sent a delegation led by Sara Pavkov, who became environment minister in April 2025, to the Eighth Assembly of the Global Environment Facility, held from May 30 to June 6, and to the Eco Expo Central Asia environmental technology exhibition that ran alongside it. Serbian officials took part in a high-level plenary session on green investment and innovation, the embassy said. The exhibition opened on June 2 at the Silk Road Samarkand complex and drew close to 10,000 participants. Its first edition, held in Tashkent in 2025, attracted about 7,500 and launched more than 130 environmental projects with international partners. Uzbekistan has invited Serbia to the next edition, scheduled for June 15 to 17 next year at the CAEx Uzbekistan exhibition center in Tashkent. Both events sit inside an environmental apparatus that Uzbekistan rebuilt last November, when Mirziyoyev removed the Ministry of Ecology, Environmental Protection and Climate Change from the Cabinet of Ministers and reconstituted it as the National Committee on Ecology and Climate Change, reporting directly to the president. Aziz Abdukhakimov, who had been ecology minister, chairs the committee and serves as presidential adviser on the environment. He chaired the Samarkand assembly. Serbia has a platform of its own next year. The United Nations Environment Programme has selected it to host World Environment Day 2027, an event Belgrade intends to run in coordination with Expo 2027. Uzbekistan has confirmed it will take part in that exposition with a national pavilion. 2026-09-10 11:18:22 -
Aju chairman joins Shenzhen media forum ahead of APEC summit SEOUL, September 09 (AJP) - South Korean media executives joined more than 400 delegates at a Chinese government-organized media forum in Shenzhen on Sept. 5, two months before the city hosts this year's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' meeting. The Asia-Pacific Media Forum drew representatives from over 40 countries and regions, along with United Nations agencies and other international bodies. It was co-hosted by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the Xinhua News Agency and the Guangdong provincial government, and organized by the Shenzhen city government. China holds the rotating chair of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) this year, taking it over from South Korea, which hosted the 2025 summit in Gyeongju. Xinhua has reported that roughly 300 APEC-related meetings and events will be held in Chinese cities over the course of the year. Kwak Young-kil, chairman of Aju Media Group, which publishes AJP, sat on a panel titled "Why did APEC choose Shenzhen?" He was joined by Wang Wen, executive dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, Tan Kar Hing, a Malaysian member of parliament who chairs the Centre of Regional Strategic Studies, and Alexei Ulazov, who handles international cooperation at Russia's National Media Group. The panel discussed Shenzhen's competitiveness and the substance of cooperation under APEC. Kwak gave a series of interviews in Chinese during the forum to China Central Television, Guangzhou Daily, Shenzhen Special Zone Daily and Shenzhen Television. "Shenzhen is a city of reform, opening and inclusiveness, China's Silicon Valley and Asia's Silicon Valley," he said, describing changes he had observed in the city and across the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. He also said he expected results from the summit and from further cooperation between South Korea and China. Wang Haina, chief editor of the group's Chinese-language edition, spoke to Guangzhou Television, Shenzhen Television and Foshan Television about Chinese manufacturing, trade between the two countries and exchange among APEC economies. Delegates spent the three days before the opening touring Guangzhou, Foshan, Dongguan, Zhuhai and Zhongshan, visiting technology companies and holding four sub-forums across the province. Li Shulei, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and head of its Publicity Department, delivered the keynote address at the opening ceremony. Huang Kunming, a CPC Political Bureau member who serves as party secretary of Guangdong, also spoke. The ceremony produced a document the organizers called the Shenzhen Consensus, which described APEC as the most influential economic cooperation mechanism in the region. Sixteen founding organizations from China and abroad formed an organizing committee for a new Asia-Pacific Media Partnership Program. The South China Morning Post reported that the founders include the People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Russia's TASS and the Vietnam News Agency. China will host the 33rd APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Shenzhen in November, the third time it has hosted the summit after Shanghai in 2001 and Beijing in 2014. 2026-09-09 11:10:03 -
Hormuz contribution stays undecided as Iran warns Seoul SEOUL, September 08 (AJP) - The government does not accept the assessment that its own handling of an attack on a South Korean cargo ship in May left an opening for Iran's warning to Seoul this week, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday. That warning came on Sept. 7. Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei posted a statement written in Korean on his X account, telling South Korea that any country stationing forces or joining operations in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would be treated as directly backing an act of aggression and would face serious consequences. The post carried an image with a single line in Korean, "dangerous choices carry a price." Baqaei opened by noting that ties between Iran and South Korea run back more than 64 years and have rested on mutual respect. South Korea has consulted every country involved since the crisis began, on passage through the strait and on stabilizing the situation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said. It has also continued to discuss what it called practical and military contributions toward that goal. That wording carries weight. MOFA's standing position is that the government is in close consultation with the international community on ways to restore free navigation in the strait and support peace and stability in the Middle East, and that no specific contribution has been decided. The Ministry of National Defense said on Sept. 4 that reports of a decision to deploy were not accurate and that nothing had been settled. MOFA held that same line Tuesday while calling the contributions under discussion military ones. What is under review has been reported in detail. South Korean outlets including Herald Business reported in early September, citing government and military sources, that the government was weighing the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, a navy logistics support ship and an explosive ordnance disposal team. The 11,000-ton Soyang has been named in that reporting as the ship under consideration. A senior Cheong Wa Dae official told reporters on Sept. 4 that combat and non-combat options were being examined together, and that nothing was fixed. A deployment would be South Korea's first at U.S. request since the Zaytun division went to Iraq in 2004. It would need a decision by the National Security Council, a cabinet vote and the consent of the National Assembly. At the center of the criticism is the Namu, a multipurpose carrier operated by HMM. The ship was struck on May 4 while at anchor off Umm Al Quwain in the United Arab Emirates, with six South Korean and 18 foreign crew aboard. None were hurt. Officials first discussed the blast as a possible fire. On May 10, the government announced that a joint investigation had found the vessel was hit from outside by unidentified flying objects. Cheong Wa Dae condemned the strike the next day and said an attack on a civilian ship could never be accepted. It has never named who carried it out. That gap, between the early account and the later finding, is what critics point to. President Donald Trump pressed Seoul directly in the days after the strike. He wrote on Truth Social that Iran had attacked ships belonging to countries with no direct stake in the shipping operation, among them a South Korean cargo ship, and said it was time for South Korea to join. He has said in public remarks since then that Seoul turned down his requests for help on Iran. Countries importing large volumes of Middle Eastern crude, he has argued, should take on the work of keeping the strait open themselves. Japan and other governments carry comparable exposure in the strait. On why the pressure from Washington has fallen most visibly on Seoul, MOFA declined to read American motives, saying a comment on them would not be appropriate. Free passage for all vessels and stability across the region are goals the international community shares, the ministry said, and South Korea is in close contact with other governments to reach them. MOFA took the same position on the argument that friction over investment commitments and commercial disputes with the United States is now returning as a security bill. The two governments consult at every level, it said, and work through each issue as it arises. Tuesday's briefing followed an earlier warning from Tehran. On Sept. 4, a senior Iranian official handling security and political affairs told Iran's Fars news agency and the Lebanese outlet Al Mayadeen that South Korea should not yield to American pressure to cooperate with what he called an illegal military operation. If South Korea acts against Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, he said, Tehran will regard it as direct military participation in a war of aggression against the country. AJP Takeaways - Esmaeil Baqaei, Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson, posted a Korean-language warning on X on Sept. 7 that stationing forces or joining operations in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would be treated as backing an act of aggression. - South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday it disagrees with the assessment that its handling of the May attack on the HMM Namu left an opening for that pressure. - The Ministry of National Defense said on Sept. 4 that reports of a decision to deploy were not accurate and that nothing had been settled. - Cheong Wa Dae condemned the May 4 strike on the Namu and has never named who carried it out. 2026-09-08 16:42:50 -
Naver takes AI into France's national broadcast archive SEOUL, September 08 (AJP) - An agreement signed at an international film summit in southern France on Monday (local time) will put South Korean artificial intelligence to work inside France's national broadcast archive. Naver signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with the Institut national de l'audiovisuel, France's national broadcast archive, at the Lumière Summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The two sides will carry out joint research on AI-based preservation and restoration of archive material, develop new digital content and experiences drawn from the holdings, and exchange specialists and seminars, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said Tuesday. The ministry described the pairing as an attempt to combine the archive's capacity to preserve and digitize audiovisual heritage with Naver's AI technology and platform capabilities. The deal emerged from a gathering that had spent the day working through what AI is doing to the people who make films. President Lee Jae Myung, who co-chaired the summit with French President Emmanuel Macron, used his opening address to name coexistence between human creativity and AI as one of four priorities for the industry, alongside the crisis facing movie theaters, protecting cultural diversity through support for independent films, and building a mutually beneficial relationship between local and global content businesses. Participants adopted the Lumière Declaration, which frames film as a public good. The Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) was created in 1975 when France broke up its state broadcasting monopoly, and it has held the country's audiovisual legal deposit since 1992. That obligation requires it to record 179 television channels and radio stations continuously. Since the deposit was extended to the internet in 2006, it has also collected the contents of more than 14,000 websites and 12,600 social media accounts, according to the institute. For Naver, the agreement arrives in the middle of a year spent selling its AI abroad. The company operates HyperCLOVA X, a family of large language models trained heavily on Korean-language material, and its cloud unit has marketed the technology to overseas governments and institutions as sovereign AI, meaning systems a country can run without depending on foreign providers. Naver signed an infrastructure agreement with Advanced Micro Devices in March to build computing capacity tuned to HyperCLOVA X, and expanded a cloud partnership with Nvidia in June. Neither the ministry nor Naver disclosed what the archive work will cost, when it will begin, or what it is expected to produce. The memorandum names no research program and sets no deadline, and the announcement says nothing about whether Naver will be permitted to train its models on INA material. The summit drew 274 participants from 58 countries, including culture ministers, international organization officials, studio and media executives, directors and actors. Lee and Macron used it to launch a five-year investment program under which South Korea and France will each put 500 million euros into their domestic film and audiovisual industries from 2027 through 2031, a combined 1 billion euros ($1.17 billion). Culture Minister Chae Hwi-young led the South Korean delegation through the day's working sessions. He came to the job from the industry the agreement now involves, having headed the Naver division at NHN Corporation, which was later renamed Naver Corporation, before serving as its chief executive and then as an adviser to the company. He went on to run the travel and ticketing group Interpark. Chae separately signed a film co-production treaty with Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli. Films recognized as joint productions under the treaty will be treated as domestic films in both countries, making them eligible for film fund incentives, tax credits and subsidies, with the movement of crew and equipment guaranteed. Two other South Korean parties signed accords at the summit. The content producer SLL agreed with Mediawan, described by the ministry as Europe's largest media group, to develop remakes of each side's intellectual property formats for Korean and European audiences and to pursue multi-genre co-productions aimed at the global market. The Korean Film Council agreed with the Motion Picture Association to cooperate on discovering and training new talent, exchanging specialists, sharing information and holding screening events. "The South Korean government, as a hub of international audiovisual content production and the most trustworthy partner, will widen the freedom to create and will spare no policy or institutional support," Chae said in his closing address. AJP Takeaways - Naver signed a strategic memorandum with the Institut national de l'audiovisuel at the Lumiere Summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence to research AI-based preservation and restoration of France's national broadcast archive, which has held the country's audiovisual legal deposit since 1992 and records 179 television channels and radio stations continuously. - Lee Jae Myung, who co-chaired the summit with Emmanuel Macron, named coexistence between human creativity and AI one of four priorities for the industry, and participants adopted the Lumiere Declaration framing film as a public good. - Naver has spent the year marketing its HyperCLOVA X models to overseas governments and institutions as sovereign AI, signing an infrastructure agreement with Advanced Micro Devices in March and expanding a cloud partnership with Nvidia in June. - Naver and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism disclosed no cost, no timeline, no named research program and no terms on whether Naver may train its models on archive material. 2026-09-08 10:41:33 -
Sookmyung professor wins 5-year grant for kidney disease study SEOUL, September 08 (AJP) - A government program created this year to keep South Korea's most decorated scientists in the laboratory after they reach retirement age will pay for five years of kidney disease research at Sookmyung Women's University. The Ministry of Science and ICT announced the program on April 2 and picked 20 researchers nationwide with the National Research Foundation of Korea. Universities and state-funded institutes could nominate up to three candidates each. Eligibility extended to researchers aged 61 and over who had already retired or who would reach mandatory retirement within three years of the July 1 start date, including those without tenure. The ministry built the program around a problem it named plainly, that a researcher's most productive networks and expertise are cut off on a fixed date regardless of what that researcher is still capable of producing. Among the 20 is Park Jong-hoon, a research professor at Sookmyung's Research Institute of Women's Health. The award is worth up to 1.125 billion won, about $836,000 at 1,345 won to the dollar, over five years. Park spent 23 years teaching in the university's Division of Biological Sciences and retired in August 2024. He received the Innovation Medal of the Order of Science and Technology Merit in 2026, the second of the honor's five grades. The citation credited his basic research and his work on national strategic technology projects, along with his service to scientific societies and government committees. He led the Korean Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as its president in 2022, an organization of more than 17,000 members. Sookmyung said he has published more than 100 papers, including articles in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded. The funded work centers on polycystic kidney disease, an inherited disorder in which fluid-filled sacs multiply through both kidneys until they crowd out functioning tissue. Patients often live decades without symptoms before the damage forces them onto dialysis or a transplant list. There is no cure. Park plans to run secretome profiling on polycystic kidney disease cell lines. The secretome is the full set of proteins and other molecules a cell releases into its surroundings, the chemical vocabulary cells use to talk to one another. By cataloging what diseased kidney cells send out, he intends to identify the key factors that govern those exchanges, then trace how changes in cell-to-cell signaling line up with the way the disease starts and worsens. The approach breaks with how the field has largely worked. Most research has examined the cyst cell on its own, treating the disease as a failure inside individual cells rather than a breakdown in how cells coordinate. What the project will produce is a proposed mechanism, not a treatment. The work runs in cultured cell lines, not in patients or animals, and identifying a signaling factor is several steps removed from showing that blocking it slows cyst growth in a living kidney. Nothing in the plan tests a drug. "We will move away from research centered on single cyst cells and establish a new paradigm that expands the study of polycystic kidney disease mechanisms around the network between cells," Park said. 2026-09-08 09:24:30 -
OPINION: South Korea needs its own Iran policy Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued its warning to South Korea in Korean. Esmaeil Baqaei, the ministry's spokesman and the official who states Iran's positions to the outside world, posts in English nearly every day. On Monday, he put up a statement on X, written in Korean, addressed to a public whose president had landed in Nice the evening before. It opens warmly. "The relationship between Iran and the Republic of Korea has a history spanning more than 64 years, and the ties between our two countries have developed throughout on a foundation of mutual respect," he wrote. "Iran places great importance on its friendly relations with the Republic of Korea." The warning sits in the middle. Any other country that stations forces in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, or joins operations there, cannot be regarded as anything other than a direct supporter of the party committing aggression, and it will bring about serious consequences. The statement ends on sovereignty. "No state possessing sovereignty and responsibility should submit to American pressure and intimidation and join in complicity with acts of aggression and appalling crimes against the great people of Iran." Nowhere in it does Baqaei write South Korea, or navy, or deployment. The middle paragraph says "another country." Writing the whole thing in Korean did the naming for him. Lee Jae Myung spent Monday in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, co-chairing a film summit with Emmanuel Macron. He arrives in Paris on Tuesday for lunch at the Élysée, a summit and a state dinner. A Cheong Wa Dae official said last week the agenda could take in nuclear power cooperation and a South Korean troop deployment to the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran wrote to South Koreans in Korean. Seoul will work out its reply over lunch in Paris, which would not be a first. Twice already this year, South Korea has taken a position on Iran, and both times it did so inside a text somebody else had drafted. On March 19, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan condemned Iranian attacks on commercial shipping and the closure of the strait, and told Tehran to comply with Security Council Resolution 2817. Seoul's name went onto the document afterward. So did more than 30 others. Two weeks later, Lee and Macron stood together at Cheong Wa Dae and announced that South Korea and France would work to secure safe maritime routes through Hormuz. Neither explained how, and they took no questions. There is a precedent for what happens when Seoul enforces an Iran policy it did not write. The Hankuk Chemi was carrying 7,200 tons of chemical products when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps boarded it on Jan. 4, 2021, and took it into Bandar Abbas. Iran said the tanker had been polluting the Gulf. Its owner said it had not. What Tehran wanted was the roughly $7 billion of Iranian oil money sitting in two South Korean banks, frozen there under American sanctions. Most of the crew flew home in early February, after Seoul agreed to unblock $1 billion. The ship and its captain stayed until April 9. The remaining money was not released until August 2023, and then only because Washington and Tehran had struck a prisoner deal. Iran had no way to reach the government that wrote those sanctions, so it took a ship belonging to the government that enforced them. Four weeks ago, the Iranian embassy in Seoul put a softer version of the same argument to AJP. Mohammad Esmaeil Passandideh, counselor and deputy head of mission, said the postwar period would be a good moment to rebuild. He also said Iran had given South Korean shipping free and secure passage right through the war, and had expected Seoul to speak up in return. That second claim is his, and it has not been verified. He said something else in that interview. Iran, he told AJP, was not looking to close or blockade the strait once the war ended. On Sunday, Mohsen Rezaei, who runs Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said a restricted zone would be declared around the strait and parts of the Gulf, with any ship entering it added to a sanctions list. An assurance from Tehran is worth what the receiving government can test it against. Testing takes people who know the file, channels that do not run through a third capital, and a settled view of your own. South Korea is thin on all three. The standard reply is that Seoul cannot afford to freelance on this. In March, that held up. Before the war, roughly 70 percent of South Korean crude came through Hormuz. Middle Eastern barrels are now about half of imports, down from two-thirds a year earlier, with American, African and Latin American oil taking the rest. The dependency that justified the silence has shrunk considerably, though nobody in Seoul appears to have revisited the silence. None of this settles whether South Korean ships should sail. That argument is worth having, and serious people in Seoul are on both sides of it. What is not worth having is a third year in which this country's Iran policy amounts to whatever Washington asks for and Paris helps phrase. Passandideh said it in August, weeks before any of this week's messages went out. "It will be too late for Korea to wait for the green light from the United States," he said. *The author is the assistant editor of AJP. 2026-09-07 17:24:24 -
Researchers propose treating cancer by refolding genome SEOUL, September 07 (AJP) - How the genome is folded inside a cell can drive cancer without any change to the DNA sequence itself, and a review by two South Korean researchers argues that the folding should be treated as a target for cancer drugs. The review appeared in June in Experimental & Molecular Medicine, a journal published by the Korean Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Its authors, Jang Sun-young and Yoo Kyung-hyun, work in the Laboratory of Biomedical Genomics at Sookmyung Women's University. The paper reports no new experiments. It surveys what the field has established about the shape of the genome in tumors and proposes what might be done with that knowledge. The proposal rests partly on the same laboratory's earlier results. Working with liver cancer cells, the Sookmyung group reported in July last year in the journal Cancer Communications that an activated form of the protein STAT3 pulls distant stretches of DNA into new points of contact, switching on genes that drive invasion and the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. When STAT3 inhibitors were applied, the drug reached its target, but the rearranged structure stayed where it was. A tumor whose architecture outlasts the drug can keep the same genes running. That is one reason a treatment can work on paper and fail in a patient. Folding matters because there is so much DNA and so little room for it. A human cell carries roughly two meters of DNA inside a nucleus about six micrometers wide, less than a tenth the width of a human hair. The molecule is more than 300,000 times longer than the space that holds it, and the way it is packed determines which genes a cell can read. That packing follows a rough order. At the largest scale the genome sorts itself into two broad territories, one where active genes cluster together and one where silenced regions do. Within those territories the DNA is divided into neighborhoods, called topologically associating domains, that behave something like walled blocks. A gene inside a block can be reached by the control switches inside the same block and is largely shielded from switches next door. Inside the blocks, the strand loops back on itself to bring particular switches into contact with particular genes. Two proteins do much of the building. CCCTC-binding factor, usually written as CTCF, marks the boundaries, and a ring-shaped protein complex called cohesin draws the strand through itself to form the loops. When either is damaged or lost, walls come down. What follows is the part that makes the folding a cancer problem. A broken boundary lets a control switch from one neighborhood reach a gene in the next, a process researchers call enhancer hijacking. Some of these switches are unusually powerful stretches of DNA known as super-enhancers, and when one of them is redirected onto a gene that promotes cell growth, the gene can be driven hard without a single letter of its sequence changing. Seeing any of this required instruments that did not exist a generation ago. Hi-C, the technique that opened the field, chemically locks together pieces of DNA that are physically touching, then sequences them to build a map of which parts of the genome are in contact with which others. HiChIP narrows that map to contacts involving a particular protein. Single-cell methods apply the same logic one cell at a time, which matters in tumors, where no two cells are quite alike. Applied across tumor types, these tools have found spatial reorganization to be widespread rather than exceptional. The review's therapeutic argument turns on plasticity. Structure, unlike a mutation, is not fixed. Boundaries that have collapsed in a cancer cell might be restored, and the review points to CRISPR-based tools that can already move or rebuild specific contacts in the laboratory. A second proposed lever is phase separation, the tendency of certain proteins to gather into dense liquid droplets inside the nucleus, much as oil separates from water. Those droplets concentrate the machinery that switches genes on, and in some cancers they form where they should not. Dissolving or restraining them is one way the review suggests the architecture might be pushed back toward normal. Jang, who took her undergraduate degree at Sookmyung and then completed a master's and doctorate there under Yoo's supervision, said understanding three-dimensional genome structure "explains the mechanism of cancer in a new way and will be an important foundation for patient-tailored precision medicine and the development of next-generation cancer treatments." None of it has been tried as a treatment. Restoring a collapsed boundary and controlling phase separation are proposals, not results. CRISPR tools that edit genome architecture are laboratory instruments used on cells in a dish, and neither the review nor the work it draws on identifies a compound that could do the same thing in a person. No drug designed to target the shape of the genome rather than its sequence has entered a clinical trial. Journal/Source: Experimental & Molecular Medicine (IF=17.5, JCR 2.9%) Title: 3D chromatin architecture in cancer: mechanisms of dysregulation and emerging therapeutic strategies Link/DOI: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42249089/ AJP Takeaways - Sookmyung Women's University researchers Jang Sun-young and Yoo Kyung-hyun argue in Experimental & Molecular Medicine that the folded shape of the genome inside a cell nucleus drives cancer independently of mutations in the DNA sequence, and that the folding itself should be treated as a drug target. - The same laboratory reported in Cancer Communications in July last year that in liver cancer cells, structural rearrangements caused by the protein STAT3 persisted after STAT3 inhibitors were applied, a possible mechanism for why a targeted drug can reach its target and still fail. - The June paper is a review rather than original research, and the strategies it proposes, restoring collapsed structural boundaries and controlling the formation of protein droplets in the nucleus, have not been tested as treatments in patients. - No drug designed to target genome architecture rather than genetic sequence has entered a clinical trial. 2026-09-07 14:10:46 -
Battery scans read bumps as ion movement: KAIST SEOUL, September 07 (AJP) - Some of the signals that battery researchers read as ions moving inside a material are produced by nothing more than an uneven surface, a team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology found, and the correction is as simple as polishing the sample flat. The team tested the effect on single-crystal silicon, a material in which no ions travel, after machining fine trenches into its surface, and a signal resembling ion movement appeared anyway. The same behavior showed up in a graphite anode of the kind used in lithium-ion batteries and in a sodium solid electrolyte. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced the findings Monday. Batteries work by shuttling lithium or sodium ions back and forth inside the cell as they charge and discharge. How fast and how freely those ions travel determines how quickly a battery can be refilled and how long it survives, so laboratories building the next generation of cells spend much of their effort mapping where inside a material ions flow easily and where they stall. One of the main tools for that mapping is electrochemical strain microscopy. The instrument drags an extremely fine probe across the surface of a battery material and applies a small alternating voltage through the tip. The voltage nudges the ions nearby, the material swells or contracts by an amount far too small to see as they crowd or thin out, and the probe registers the flexing. Ion traffic is never observed directly, only inferred from it. That is what leaves the measurement exposed. A change in the height of the surface alters how firmly the tip presses against the sample, and that shift alone moves the reading. The instrument's control system, which adjusts continuously to keep the probe tracking the surface, lags a fraction behind a sudden step or dip, and during the lag the contact stiffens or softens. The result looks much like ions on the move. To separate the two, the researchers needed a sample incapable of producing a real signal. Silicon in single-crystal form conducts no ions, so anything the instrument picked up had to come from the shape of the surface. Cutting trenches into it reproduced the grooves and steps found on a sliced battery electrode, and the height changes on their own generated a response. The mechanism resembles what happens to a car on a rutted road. The body rises and falls with the surface and the load on the tires changes with it. A probe crossing a ridge on an electrode behaves the same way, and the varying pressure feeds straight into the measurement. Real materials behaved no differently. In a graphite anode and in a sodium solid electrolyte known as Na2Zn2TeO6, the reading tracked the shape of the surface, which pointed to a problem that follows the instrument rather than any one class of material. The sharpest case appeared at grain boundaries, the seams where the small crystals making up a battery material meet, similar to the lines between laid tiles. Ions are widely thought to move quickly along those seams, and before the samples were smoothed the signal there was strong. After smoothing, the extra signal was gone. Smoothing was done with a cooling cross-section polisher, a machine that trims the cut face of a sample with a beam of argon ions. Argon reacts with almost nothing, which lets the beam shape a surface without changing the chemistry underneath. Roughness fell sharply, and the false readings fell with it. The work stops short of showing that published measurements of fast ion movement along grain boundaries were wrong. It establishes that surface shape by itself can generate a comparable signal, and that in these samples the extra signal at the seams vanished once the face was flattened. How much earlier work carries the same error has not been tested, and the polishing method was demonstrated on a small set of materials. Accurate readings at this scale also feed a second line of research, in which artificial intelligence and machine learning systems are trained on nanoscale data to predict how a new battery material will perform before anyone builds it. Those predictions are only as reliable as the measurements behind them. Three groups at KAIST ran the study together. Hong Seung-bum and Yuk Jong-min, both in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, worked with Choi Nam-soon in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Hong said he expects the result to help researchers "understand and design the operating principles of next-generation battery materials," including solid-state cells that replace liquid electrolyte with a solid and sodium-ion cells that swap lithium for a cheaper and far more plentiful metal. The paper appeared online June 11 in the journal Small Methods. Dongyan Chen, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is its first author. Journal/Source: Small Methods Title: Quantitative Analysis of Topographic Crosstalk in DART-ESM Arising from Feedback-Loop-Delay-Induced Contact Stiffness Variations in Battery Materials Link/DOI: 10.1002/smtd.70763 AJP Takeaways - KAIST said a widely used nanoscale imaging technique can produce signals resembling ion movement when the only thing changing is the height of the sample surface. - KAIST researchers reproduced the effect on single-crystal silicon, which conducts no ions, and again in a graphite anode and the sodium solid electrolyte Na2Zn2TeO6. - KAIST reported that the strong signal seen at grain boundaries disappeared once the sample face was flattened with an argon ion beam, and the team did not test how much earlier work carries the same error. - Small Methods published the paper online June 11, three months before the announcement, tracing the false readings to a lag in the instrument's tracking system that changes how firmly the probe presses on the surface. 2026-09-07 09:53:35 -
South Korea backs rules-based Arctic order at Japan research meeting SEOUL, September 04 (AJP) - Cooperation on the Arctic among South Korea, China and Japan matters more as the region warms and its politics harden, South Korea's ambassador for polar affairs told a research meeting in northern Japan this week. None of the three countries holds territory above the Arctic Circle. All three were admitted as observers to the Arctic Council, the main intergovernmental forum for the region, at a ministerial meeting in Kiruna, Sweden, in May 2013, alongside India, Italy and Singapore. Observers may attend meetings and contribute to working groups, but they do not vote. Lee Tae-woo attended the 12th meeting of the North Pacific Arctic Research Community, held in Monbetsu, Hokkaido, from Sept. 2 to 4, and delivered congratulatory remarks, South Korea's foreign ministry said. Lee credited the network with growing into a platform for concrete and practical cooperation across a range of fields. He also stressed that the South Korean government seeks a peaceful, sustainable and open Arctic, and said it would continue to contribute to international cooperation on the region grounded in international norms. This year's session of the North Pacific Arctic Research Community (NPARC) took up the state of Arctic cooperation by countries outside the region and where the three neighbors might work together next. Participants presented on Arctic policy, natural science, Arctic shipping routes and the participation of Indigenous peoples in decisions affecting the region. Those taking part included Japan's ambassador for Arctic affairs, the head of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, the president of the Korea Maritime Institute and experts drawn from industry, universities and research institutes. On the margins of the meeting, Lee met Takahashi Katsuhiko, Japan's ambassador for Arctic affairs, and the two discussed major Arctic issues and ways for the two countries to cooperate in the region. The ministry said South Korea would keep contributing to international cooperation on Arctic peace and sustainable development as a responsible Arctic Council observer. NPARC has been held every year since 2014, rotating among the three countries. The Korea Maritime Institute, the Hokkaido University Arctic Research Center and the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies serve as the national secretariats. AJP Takeaways - Lee Tae-woo, South Korea's ambassador for polar affairs, told the 12th North Pacific Arctic Research Community meeting in Monbetsu, Hokkaido, on Sept. 2 to 4 that Arctic cooperation among South Korea, China and Japan matters more as the region warms and its politics harden. - South Korea's foreign ministry said the government seeks a peaceful, sustainable and open Arctic and would keep contributing to cooperation grounded in international norms as an Arctic Council observer. - Takahashi Katsuhiko, Japan's ambassador for Arctic affairs, met Lee on the margins of the session, where the two discussed major Arctic issues and bilateral cooperation in the region. - The Arctic Council admitted South Korea, China and Japan as observers at its Kiruna ministerial in May 2013, alongside India, Italy and Singapore, giving them attendance and working-group roles but no vote. 2026-09-04 17:08:34