Ho Wang Lee


Ho Wang Lee is a South Korean physician, epidemiologist, and virologist. He is the first person in the history of medicine to be the one chiefly responsible for all 3 of the following steps: discovery of the virus causing a human disease, development of a method of diagnosis for the disease, and development of a vaccine against the disease.
Lee studied medicine at Seoul National University with a M.D. degree in 1954 and was awarded a doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1959. From 1954 to 1972 he was a professor of microbiology at the Medical College of Seoul National University, as well as dean of the Medical College. From 1972 to 1994 he was the director of the Department of Virology of Korea University. Since 1994 he has been the director of the ASAN Institute for Life Sciences in South Korea.
In 1976 Lee and his collaborators succeeded in isolating the virus causing Korean hemorrhagic fever; they gave it the name Hantaan virus. The discovery caused a sensation in the international community of medical researchers, because the quest for isolating the virus had been the subject of intense effort since the early 1950s. The research involved in isolating the virus was dangerous, and several of Lee's collaborators became ill due to aerosols produced by chronically infected rodents.
In 1989 Lee and collaborators developed a formalin-inactivated suckling mouse Hantaan virus vaccine, which under the name Hantavax™ has been approved for commercial use in South Korea since 1990. In 1990 Tomiyama and Lee published their findings for their method of rapid serodiagnosis of hantavirus infections.
Ho Wang Lee became one of the first South Korean scientists to gain international fame while continuing to do research primarily in South Korea.

Awards and honors