A strong advocate of Asian-African cooperation in food and health has died in Melbourne , Australia .

Soo Sien, like so many professional women, contributed more to society, science, and health than she herself acknowledged or that others knew. Indeed, the discovery of Soo's beneficial impact on those around her and afar has been more evident in her death than in her life. She would not have guessed that hundreds of tributes would flow from the many networks she supported during her life. One of her now retired senior medical colleagues and a medical educator wrote “the ability to integrate science and care at the level achieved by Soo is probably more innate than learned”. She had “the healing touch”, as her patients invariably felt better just by seeing her, irrespective of their medical condition.

Dr Huang Soo Sien was born in Singapore when occupied by the Japanese during the 2 nd World War in 1944, rather than the 1941 stated on her adjusted birth certificate. This arrangement, by her mother, enabled more rice to be obtained for the family. How amazing! Food security by quantity and quality, remained important throughout her life.

Ironically, when Soo was born her family put themselves at considerable risk by hiding Australian soldiers in their ceiling to save them from the Japanese occupiers of Singapore . Later she was to contend with the “White Australia Policy” by marrying a European Australian. Together with like-minded friends, the newly-married couple founded the Asian-Australian Family Association to support families like their own.

When her first cousin arrived in Singapore , smuggled out of China after the revolution of 1949, she presented him with her only apple, and his first morsel of food in Singapore . This became symbolic of the generosity which characterized her life.

Despite being younger than her stated years, she excelled academically and athletically and began medical studies in Adelaide in 1960. She met her future husband Mark Wahlqvist within days of arrival in Australia and they eventually married in Singapore in 1967. They have had a particularly close and productive cross-cultural partnership. Together they wrote about food and health and she actively encouraged and participated in Mark's research, and his clinical and public health interests in food and health, especially as they related to cultural difference and migration.

Her cooking skills, and exquisite sense of taste and smell added greatly to her keen sense of food, nutrition and medical science.

Soo Sien died of the sequelae of a severe disabling haemorrhagic stroke, without known risk factors apart from being of Chinese ancestry. Her premature death defies her own interest, promotion and embrace of preventive nutrition and health. It underscores our ongoing state of ignorance about risk and the need for more creative solutions to the differences in susceptibility to disease that may start as early as conception or in previous generations, aside from these that are contemporary and unquestionably important.

“Dr Soo”, as she was affectionately known, has changed the lives of many and of the communities in which she has lived for the better, bearing no animosity for prejudice, but overcoming it.

Although not physically with us anymore, she lives on through the lives she has changed, befitting her rather eclectic Buddhist and wider belief systems.

I write this as a good friend of the family, and with the knowledge that Soo shared her husband Mark with the rest of the world. Prof. Dr Mark Wahlqvist became President of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences, promising to be utmost supportive of the African cause. He has done exactly that. As he hands over his Presidency in South Africa next year, we African nutrition scientists will feel greatly indebted to him for his tireless efforts to make a difference for our people on the continent.

To Mark and the children and other family members, please feel our empathy and may our creator enable you to remember Soo in a most gracious way.

May God rest her soul in Eternal Peace.

Professor Ruth Oniang'o
Editor-in-Chief