Huh Young-sup

Korean spelling
Hangeul	허영섭
Revised Romanization	Heo Yeong-seop
McCune- Reischauer	Hŏ Yŏngsŏp
See also : Korean name

Huh Young-sup (born October 9, 1941 in Kepung in the province of Kōkaidō in Chōsen , then the Japanese Empire , today's North Korea ; † November 15, 2009 ) was a South Korean metallurgical specialist and entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical industry .

Live and act

At the beginning of the Korean War , the son of a lime manufacturer was able to flee to Busan together with his father , whereas the mother had to stay in North Korea. After his father was able to rebuild a lime works in another city, Huh was given the financial opportunity to complete his first engineering degree at Seoul National University after finishing school in 1960 . On the recommendation of his father, from 1964 onwards he studied iron and steel engineering at RWTH Aachen University , where he passed the engineering examination in 1968 and obtained his doctorate in 1970.

Then Huh had to do his military service in South Korea . In the meantime, his father invested the company profits from the lime plant in a company that produced vaccines for animals and feed additives. Since this business was not particularly profitable, his father took him over to the management of the company after his military service in order to renovate the business. Huh accepted the challenge, renamed the company " Green Cross Corporate Korea " and set up a completely new portfolio . Huh now had drugs produced on the basis of plasma , plasma derivatives and urokinase and specialized in combating hepatitis B diseases. After just a few years, Green Cross Corp. one of the most successful companies in South Korea. In the following years, Huh founded the Green Cross Corp. Affiliated " Mogam Biotechnology Research Institute " and licensed subsidiaries, initially in Nanjing, China, and in 1999 in Pyongyang, North Korea .

In all these years, as long-time chairman of the South Korean alumni association , Huh kept in close contact with his former German alma mater in Aachen . For example, in the area of ​​RWTH Aachen University, he made it possible to build “MOGAM”, a learning and work center for students, where MOGAM means something like “make the earth bloom ”. For these services, the RWTH Aachen appointed Huh Young-sup as its honorary senator in 2002 , which was the first award of this kind for a foreign scientist since the founding of the TH Aachen in 1870.

In addition, in addition to his numerous duties on boards of directors and supervisory boards of several South Korean pharmaceutical and industrial associations, Huh took over the presidency of the “ German-Korean Society e. V. ”in Berlin, an umbrella organization of 24 German-South Korean associations. Huh was also a board member of the “ German-Korean Chamber of Industry and Commerce ” in Seoul and the initiator of a German-South Korean forum, which has now developed into one of the most important events in the political, economic and cultural dialogue between Germany and South Korea and alternately in both Countries takes place.

Honors (selection)

• National Order of Merit, Moran Medal (Second Level of National Medal)
• Changjo Medal of the Order of Science and Technology Merit
• Inchon Award
• Federal Cross of Merit, First Class
• Honorary Doctorate from Hanyang University Seoul, 2001
• Honorary Senator of RWTH Aachen University, 2002

Web links

• Biography at EvaluatePharma (English)
• Obituary of the RWTH Aachen
• MOGAM Aachen
• Christian Schmidt-Häuer: Portrait: The Border Crosser . The time of August 14, 2003

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Inchon Award ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved June 14, 2013 (Korean). 

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Huh is the family name here, Young-sup is the first name.