South korea being the first Asian country to set up comp...

Currently, only South Korea has enacted legislation that includes specific and broad provisions to prevent GD, the Bioethics and Safety Act (BSA). In addition, measures protecting people against GD have been included in research oversight frameworks, such as national ethics guidelines and research ...

... GMI’s director, Jong-Il Kim, looking at a specimen through a microscope.© Genomic Medicine Institute · Since publishing the first whole-genome sequence of a South Korean individual in Nature in 2009, researchers at the Genomic Medicine ...

Given that southern Chinese and Southeast Asian harbor a relatively heavier enrichment of Denisovan components in their genome than northern Chinese, Northeast Asians seem to have separate origins from the Southeast Asians13. This would have also occurred about 40,000 years ago when modern humans first settled in the Korean Peninsula.

In this issue of Current Biology, Pere Gelabert, Asta Blazyte, Ron Pinhasi, and colleagues reported the first high-coverage paleo-genomic data on ancient Koreans from the southeastern part of South Korea, shedding light on the genetic origin of the Three Kingdoms period (4th–5th centuries CE) Koreans and allowing an in-depth assessment of the dilution of Jomon-related ancestry in Korea8. East Asia is home to extensive ethnic and linguistic diversity. Generally, the genetic structure in present-day East Asians results from complex admixture events from multiple sources of genetic diversity, showing solid concordance with geographic and linguistic distribution1.

Nevertheless, our results show that Jomon-related ancestry persisted at high levels in South Korea until at least the TK period, around 500 CE. Moreover, the fact that Jomon has not been identified as a dominant cultural component in the Gimhae area at any time and that present-day Koreans show high genetic homogeneity with no Jomon-related ancestry implies that the Korea-TK populations bearing Jomon-related ancestry were probably completely absorbed by incoming populations originating from northern China who entered along the Korean peninsular coastlines, leading to the genetic homogeneity observed in present-day Koreans.

To check the veracity of the 2004 paper, the committee collected 23 samples of the cell line supposedly described in the work, which the team called NT-1. Twenty samples came from Hwang's lab, and one each from the Korean Cell Line Bank; MizMedi Hospital in Seoul, where several collaborators worked; and the lab of Hwang's collaborator at SNU, Shin Yong Moon. The committee said it asked three independent labs to test the DNA from all 23 samples, and all three labs reported identical results. Those results suggest that Hwang and his colleagues falsified much of the data in the paper. Hwang's team claimed that NT-1 was an exact genetic match with cells of donor A, but the committee found that the line "is quite distinct from what was reported in the Science article."

With rapid developments in genomic and digital technologies, genomic data sharing has become a key issue for the achievement of precision medicine in South Korea. The legal and administrative framework for data sharing and protection in this country ...

In addition, the Act to Promote ... Minister's Office, is mainly responsible for crafting the agenda for health and medical policy. The PIPA, enacted in 2011, serves as a general statute covering data privacy issues in Korea....

On March 13, 2025, new legislation came into effect in South Korea to help people manage and protect their personal information. It is the last part of a 2023 amendment to the Personal Information Protection Act to take effect. (Act No. 10465, Mar. 29, 2011, amended by Act No.