For Dr Thein Swee Lay, the only Malaysian scientist to have won the Breakthrough Prize, cracking a code in gene therapy was easier than hunting down an authentic version of her hometown popiah – or spring rolls – in the US, where she has been based for years.

“I have not come across a Malaysian restaurant that sells good popiah. I miss it,” Thein told This Week in Asia in an exclusive interview where she fondly reminisced about her childhood in Malaysia’s coastal town of Kuantan.

Thein, the seventh of nine children, said her large family moved from town to town in then Malaya because of her father’s civil service postings.

The constant relocation taught her to adapt to ever-changing circumstances, said the 74-year-old, who works at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda and has lived in Washington since 2015.

In April, she won one of the 2026 Breakthrough Prizes, dubbed the “Oscars of science”, for work that helped turn a decades-old mystery in blood disorders into a gene-editing discovery.