Dongho Kim
Date of birth: November 1, 1957
Position: Professor, Department of Chemistry, Yonsei University

After that really long review on carbon fibers, that still invades my dreams (well, I hope not, but my waking thoughts from time to time anyways), I need a break post and that's provided by the 'biography' of Dongho Kim from the same issue. Now, Angewandte biographies are all professional and you don't really learn anything about the person, like what it was like to study chemistry during the time of dictatorship in South Korea and the threat from the north that was credible at the time. Sometimes you get something interesting in regards to how the person chose to go into chemistry and later become a professor, but most of the time not really, and that's the case here as well. I'm pretty aware of the dissonance between useless anecdotes in a general Angewandte biography and a person's real-life experiences from the coverage of my post-doc advisor.

Nothing too interesting here, and the answer to 'what you would like to be if you were a piece of equipment' really nails the lack of useful anecdotal information here. If someone ever asks me that, I will tell them "I would like to be a $*^#ing futuristic android. So that I can do everything I do now but better and I will never die, and you would be afraid of me."

Anyways, Monet and Beethoven might be the staple of any Western oriented education for the upwardly mobile... but what's really interesting is the 'going hiking in a spare hour'. Really? I hike a lot and a one hour hike is not a real hike. And there is no way you're going to be drinking a beer after a long desert or mountain hike that took most of the day. It will destroy you.

It doesn't sound like a hike... but like a pleasant stroll. Still, this made me look up Yonsei University in Seoul on Google Earth, and it does have a pretty large forest park next to it and the pictures from it are pretty nice. So, I'm willing to believe that professor Kim goes there in a spare hour, but it's still a stroll. Not a hike.

DOI: 10.1002/anie.201311143