Bastiaan Jacob Dirk Meeuse

Bastiaan Meeuse, who has died aged 83, was a distinguished botanist with an international reputation for his research into strange and exotic plant species able to generate heat so intense that they can burn human skin. He was particularly known for unlocking the mysteries of the voodoo lily (Sauromatum guttatum), an extraordinary specimen now the target of extensive genetics research in America and Europe. There are many plants with flowers that are not conventionally beautiful either to the eye or nose, yet they fascinate botanists for other reasons. The voodoo lily is prominent among them, and it has an aroma that is more than just bad - it stinks. Fortunately its bloom is short-lived.

Meeuse spent much of his research career at the University of Washington, Seattle, unravelling the mechanism by which these huge, smelly flowers, weighing up to a half-pound, generate so much heat that they reach 108F inside. Meeuse and a series of collaborators published 200 papers on the voodoo lily in his 50 years of research.

Meeuse was born in Sukabumi, a small town on Java, Indonesia, where his parents, who were teachers, had been sent by the Dutch colonial service. When he was 11 years old, he and his family moved to Bogor, an important colonial outpost and one where Dutch biologists had established world-famous botanical gardens. The beauty and variety of the plants he saw triggered Meeuse's awareness of the natural world, and set him on course to become a biologist.

In 1931 his family moved back to the Netherlands where Baastian studied biology, zoology, chemistry and physics at the University of Leiden and received his PhD at the University of Delft in 1943. He stayed at Delft as a laboratory assistant and lecturer until 1952, interrupted by two years as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania where he studied the metabolism of pea seeds. In 1952 he joined the University of Washington and became a professor of botany in 1960.

His lectures as a student at Leiden alerted him to the existence of an unusual group of exotic plants that generated considerable amounts of heat, produced the most foul-smelling flowers, and were a botanical mystery.

This fired Meeuse's curiosity and he devoted much of his career to exploring the phenomenon and its possible implications for horticulture and agriculture. He explored other aspects of plants such as the medicinal value of natural extracts and the intricacies of pollination provided by insects and birds: his The Story of Pollination (1961) is still in demand. He was also the co-author, with Sean Morris, of The Sex Life of Flowers (1984).

His research work on plant extracts showed that salicylic acid, the active ingredient of aspirin, was spread widely throughout the plant kingdom and was an essential agent in the regulation of growth in many botanical species.

In the 1950s he accidentally discovered a moss enzyme that burns oxalic acid. It has since been used to regulate the blood of people whose circulatory systems overproduce oxalic acid, a condition that could result in a potentially fatal kidney disease.

But Meeuse's main preoccupation remained with thermogenic and usually malodorous plants and the processes responsible for the heat they liberated. In a paper in 1987, he identified salicylic acid as the substance behind the heat-producing respiratory explosion in thermogenic plants: Meeuse's team found that the salicylic acid levels in their lilies rose a hundredfold before flowering.

Biotechnologists are now isolating the genes that control the production of proteins involved in the heat- generating processes Meeuse unravelled, and are studying how to use them to breed frost-resistant crops.

In 1978, Meeuse established a unique herbarium collection of the species Garden loosestrife (Lysimachia vulgaris) at Washington University. The plant, a native of the wetlands of eastern Europe and Asia, became the focus for research that continues into the potential threat it poses to the native character of environmentally sensitive wetlands.

Meeuse is survived by his wife of 57 years, Johanne, and a son and daughter.

• Bastiaan Jacob Dirk Meeuse, botanist, born May 9, 1916; died July 27, 1999

Sources:

• American National Biography