The Saturday Profile: From A Wheelchair, A Scientist Pries Open South Korean Minds

SEOUL, South Korea

HELD upright by straps in his wheelchair, clad in a dark suit, Lee Sang-mook was delivering a lecture on marine geophysics. On the projector screen behind him at Seoul National University were animated diagrams simulating the way the world’s seas could have been formed.

To display each scene, Dr. Lee, who is paralyzed from the neck down, used his mouth to operate a bottlelike computer mouse linked to his laptop: sip from the open tip of the mouse to click left. Puff out to click right. Sip and nod to scroll.

“Scrolling is the most difficult one,” said Dr. Lee, who can talk, but whose lung capacity has shrunk to 40 percent of an average person’s.

Despite his paralysis, the result of an automobile accident two years ago, Dr. Lee, 46, remains resolutely focused on his work. In the process, he has become a model for disabled people in South Korea, where they still face prejudices and are expected to withdraw from active life.

In the South Korean news media he is frequently compared to another quadriplegic scientist, the British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. Dr. Lee modestly discourages such talk, saying the similarities are superficial.

Despite rapid economic and cultural development, South Korea still lacks social awareness of its disabled citizens and the facilities to aid them. Families with disabled members often keep them at home, sometimes hidden away, ashamed of their existence and afraid of discrimination. In fact, Dr. Lee’s decision to continue teaching at the nation’s most prestigious university has put him at odds with his wife and parents, who would prefer that he concentrate on restoring some motion to his limbs.

Dr. Lee was injured on July 2, 2006, during a geological field trip in a California desert, when the car he was driving overturned. He emerged from a coma three days later, but his fourth cervical vertebra had been fractured.

Nevertheless, he was back at work in early 2007.

Every time he tested out a new device and adapted it for his own use, Dr. Lee said, he felt a little thrill, as if he had solved a scientific problem.

He felt blessed when he found EZcaller, a device that allowed him to make and answer phone calls just by clicking his mouse. And he eventually settled on an on-screen keyboard program called Clickey, which allowed him to type by selecting each character with a click or a puff.

During a recent lunch with his colleagues, Dr. Lee amazed onlookers as he touched a microphone on the headrest of his wheelchair with his right cheek to recline the chair to prevent bedsores.

On his way back to his office from the cafeteria, Dr. Lee used his right cheek again, this time to shift the wheelchair into a mode that buffers the shock when he uses his head to steer it on a bumpy road.

“It’s like downhill skiing,” he said.

LEE SANG-MOOK was born in Seoul in 1962 and moved to Indonesia when he was 12, after his father, a banker, was transferred there. As a teenager, he became fascinated with National Geographic, devouring every issue of the magazine in the school library in Jakarta and stoking a desire to travel to remote places around the world.

One day, he recalled, his father came home, somewhat tipsy after drinking with colleagues, and suggested that Sang-mook become a scientist of an unconventional kind. His father was convinced that oceanography was the field of the future. The son was so motivated by this first man-to-man talk with his father that he eventually went on to study oceanography at Seoul National University.

His father later changed his mind and pressed him to become an herbal doctor, a position of considerable status in South Korea that would allow him to one day look after his aging parents or at least to stay close to them.

“But becoming an herbal doctor meant a locked-up life for him,” said Lee Yu-jene, 45, Dr. Lee’s younger sister. “He refused relentlessly. It was the first time he defied our parents.”

He went on to do his dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He conducted postdoctoral research on the midocean ridge south of Iceland and the southwestern Indian Ocean.

He later spent about three months a year at sea on a research vessel for the Korean Ocean Research and Development Institute before joining his alma mater’s faculty in 2003.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?