Legal Entities as Governance Tools

The government’s sponsorship meant that the political status of herbal medicines shifted from a cultural heritage to a subject of innovation. The government’s efforts to transform Korean medicines opened up a political and epistemic space where professional boundaries and the ontology of drugs are renegoti­ated and redefined.

In 2003, the Korean government passed a law stipulating the safety, qual­ity, and functionality of foods with health claims under the Health Functional Foods Act.^[804] Health Functional Food is legally defined as a product intended to enhance and preserve human health with one or more functional ingre­dients or constituents. Health functional foods are very much akin to func­tional food or functional health products in international contexts, in that they are consumed to prevent nutrition-related diseases and increase physical and mental well-being.

Classification as a Technology 229 historical evidence for review, as most functional food ingredients are derived from natural products. Consumers tended to consume health products for pur­poses of boosting the immune system, which constitutes the largest functional foods market.^[805] Thus, the government stepped in to assess, evaluate, and regu­late foods with health claims, requiring them to go through a degree of review processes.

Naturalendotech co., Ltd (NeT) is a biotechnology company founded in 2001 with concentration on research and development and commercializa­tion of natural ingredients. Looking into the domestic market structure, where health products targeted at middle-aged and older women were insufficiently developed, the company strategically focused on the development of health products for women. From the beginning, the company adopted the triple helix innovation model, although not intentionally, because a significant por­tion of R&D funds came through government research grants. As a small-sized biotechnology company, it strategized to get ahead of competing manufactur­ing or pharmaceutical companies by reutilizing natural resources and turning them into commercially marketable products via the means of techno-scientific innovations. By partnering with academia and research institutes, the company was successful in acquiring a series of patents for products that claimed to have significant effects on symptoms associated with women’s diseases starting in 2003. The company sought both domestic and international patents almost simultaneously, targeting international clientele, too.

On the other hand, the changes in governmental actions opened a long- seated conflict, in particular over natural drugs, between the two professional organizations, Western biomedicine and Korean medicine. Under the current laws, Korean medicine doctors are not permitted to prescribe or administer prescription drugs, for the reason that such drugs are based on biomedical and scientific knowledge and methods. The underlying understanding was that Korean medicine and Korean medicines (han yak) were holistic without differ­entiating theoretical principles from diagnostic and therapeutic practices, nor telling the body from mind. This was translated into the understanding that Korean medicines did not differentiate prescription drugs from generics or over-the-counter drugs. Consequently, the legal and regulation action that nat­ural drugs were labeled as prescription drugs incited a jurisdictional boundary

war between Korean medicine doctors and the Western medical circle, includ­ing the pharmaceutical industry.

VI.