Alterations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have been studied in various cancers. However, the clinical value of mtDNA copy number (mtCN) alterations in gastric cancer (GC) is poorly understood. In the present study, we investigated whether alterations in mtCNs might be associated with clinicopathological parameters in GC cases. mtCN was measured in 109 patients with GC by quantitative real-time PCR. Then, correlations with clinicopathological characteristics were analyzed. mtCN was elevated in 64.2% of GC tissues compared with paired, adjacent, non-cancerous tissue. However, the observed alterations in mtCN were not associated with any clinicopathological characteristics, including age, gender, TN stage, Lauren classification, lymph node metastasis, and depth of invasion. Moreover, Kaplan-Meier survival curves revealed that mtCN was not significantly associated with the survival of GC patients. In this study, we demonstrated that mtCN was not a significant marker for predicting clinical characteristics or prognosis in GC.

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In the 1950s, Christianity and educational achievement were the primary means for Koreans to break through the misery and powerlessness that the conflict from June 1950 to July 1953 had caused. Along with education, religion was a promising route in securing familial welfare for South Koreans. Among the several religions and denominations, Protestant churches were more popular for the uprooted people residing in urban areas. These two privately motivated daily activities—education and religion—captured the concern of the Korean people who had lost everything during the war. Under President Syngman Rhee’s “police state” and infrastructural ruin, religious and educational institutions filled the vacuum in the Republic of Korea that the Korean War had left in civil society. The Korean “habitus” of family promotion in the 1950s foretold the fast economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper will show how South Korea, during that decade, witnessed the formation of a new familialism, which tended to focus on the family’s fortune and money as a final goal. Ethical understandings and political decisions were secondary to the main priority of family promotion.

Korea had been a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Instead of becoming independent and unified, it was divided in the aftermath of World War II. The chapter describes how the American Cold War strategy of anti-communism penetrated the internal politics of South Korea, and distorted, or even prevented, like in other countries the process of decolonization, keeping the colonial apparatus in place. The historical task of reshaping the post-colonial order in East Asia was overshadowed for the US by requirements of its new hegemony and the need to rebuild the region’s capitalist economies. The systematic elimination of former independence activists, including right-wing nationalists in South Korea, by extreme anti-communists who had worked for the Japanese foretold the dominance of anti-communism in politics. The ideology of anti-communism brought South Koreans permanent surveillance, political terror, and mass killing like during colonial subjugation.