Jon Sang Hong (October 7, 1936-October 31, 2006) was one of the highly regarded pharmacists in the DPRK. He was honoured with the titles of Labour Hero, People’s Pharmacist and PhD.

Born into a worker’s family in Sinuiju, North Phyongan Province, Jon could not attend a school until the country’s liberation on August 15, 1945.

While continuing to study at school even during the fierce Fatherland Liberation War (June 25, 1950-July 27, 1953), he keenly realized how precious his motherland was.

It was early in the 1960s when he graduated from what is now Pyongyang University of Medical Sciences and was assigned as a pharmacist to the medical supplies management station in North Hwanghae Province. In three years, he managed to make injections of antibiotics such as syntomycin that had been only available as pills. At the time, this was a pharmaceutical breakthrough.

He also succeeded in making the litmus paper, which is used to find out if something is an acid or a base, from locally available medicinal stuff, bringing much benefit to the country. He went on to make lots of other achievements.

It is good if it gives even a little help to the country. This was his lifelong motto.

When he worked as general manager of a pharmaceutical factory, it was the commonly accepted norms in the world medical circles to use starch as an excipient in making pills. So local factories were consuming thousands of tons of cereals every year to extract starch to be used for granulation.

He conceived an idea of making a new excipient from bentonite, a kind of clay that is formed by degenerate volcanic ash or tuff and is abundant in the country. After painstaking research and experiments, he identified bentonite’s physical and chemical components in a scientific and technical way and established a method of dispersing and refining bentonite, thus saving large amounts of cereals and opening up a bright prospect for pill production based on bentonite as an excipient.

In addition, he worked out procedures for making antler and musk injections by means of a leaching method and prepared more than 30 kinds of efficacious medicines, which were introduced to pharmaceutical factories across the country.

He made 19 studies registered as national inventions and 15 ones as patents, with “Manufacture of casein from skimmed milk”, “Preparation of neuralgia medicines” and “Separation of santonin from Inula helenium and production of alcohol from the remnants” among them.

Jon is remembered as a socialist patriotic martyr.

Ham Kwang Hyok