A Korean-American businessman in his 70s has donated US$10 million to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the largest amount of money an overseas Korean has ever donated to his homeland. The donor is Dr. Park Byung-joon, chairman of Bureau Veritas Consumer Products Services, an international quality inspection agency in France.

Park matriculated at the Department of Material Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in 1952. As a junior, he went to the U.S. to study at MIT, where he obtained an M.Sc. He earned a Ph.D. in fiber engineering at the University of Leeds in the U.K. before returning to the U.S., where he worked at a consumer goods quality inspection and research agency. In 1986, he started his own business by establishing MTL (Merchandise Testing Lab) to test the safety of large iron and steel structures such as ships.

"At the time, there were no standards by which to test the safety of large structures. I established my own firm in the belief that the standardization of quality assessment could turn into a business. I squeezed myself into the niche market and it was a success," Park recalls. He retired from active business management in 2001, when MTL merged with Bureau Veritas, one of the world's five largest ship inspection firms. He made a huge amount of money from the merger.

His assets reportedly amount to hundreds of billions of won, and Park has since lived a philanthropic life, donating money to public institutions. He has so far donated about W20 billion (US$1=W926) to universities, hospitals and scholarship foundations in the U.S. and Korea, including his latest donation to the KAIST. He says the reason is that he experienced poverty while studying in the U.S.

"In the 1950s, everybody was so poor that they had a hard time keeping their pot boiling. When I studied in the U.S., my dream was to eat fried rice to my heart's content in a Chinese restaurant," Park said. "At the time, about 20 to 30 Korean students were studying at MIT. When I was relatively better off than other students, I made kimchi in large quantities in the bathtub, so other students could eat it."

KAIST President Suh Nam-pyo was two years junior to Park at the SNU High School in Seoul, and stayed in the U.S. when Park was there. Because of that personal relationship, Park donated $1 million as a research fund to Suh when he was working at MIT in 2002. Park decided to make the latest donation to the KAIST upon hearing that KAIST is planning to establish a research institute dubbed KI to develop technologies that would feed Korea a decade hence. "Only when a donation culture is established can Korean universities compete with other institutions around the world,” Park said. “I'm going to continue my donations if they can help young Korean men and women become world-renowned figures."

(englishnews@chosun.com )