Ho Wang Lee
South Korean virologist (1928–2022)
Ho Wang Lee (Korean: 이호왕; 26 October 1928 – 5 July 2022) was a South Korean physician, epidemiologist, and virologist. He was the first person in the history of medicine to be the one chiefly responsible for all three of the following steps: discovery of a virus causing a human disease, development of a method of diagnosis for the disease, and development of a vaccine against the disease.
Biography
Lee was born in Sinhung, Kankyōnan Province (South Hamgyong Province), Korea, Empire of Japan on 26 October 1928. He studied medicine at Seoul National University with an 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. From 1994 to his death he was 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.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ho Wang Lee” as south Korean virologist (1928–2022). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1363894. VIAF identifies the subject as 187097240. The Library of Congress control number is n2011184191. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928, 2022, 1954 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ho Wang Lee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.