Leslie Audus

Leslie John Audus (9 December 1911 – 5 May 2011) was a British botanist and an international authority on the hormones that control plant growth. During World War II, while being held in a Japanese internment camp, he cultured yeast to feed and save the lives of his fellow POW's.

Audus was born in Isleham in The Fens of Cambridgeshire.

He was educated at Soham Grammar School and in 1929 was awarded a scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge. In 1934, he was a Frank Smart University student in Botany, at Cambridge. After receiving his degree, he stayed in Cambridge to pursue postgraduate work. In 1935, he went to University College, Cardiff, where he continued to research plant physiology and taught plant science.

Audus joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1940, after which he received training in radar. In 1941, he was posted to Malaya as a flight lieutenant. While there, he explored the rain forest in Johore with John Corner, the assistant director of the Johore botanical gardens, and later became a distinguished botanist at Cambridge. According to the Telegraph, "Audus made himself popular by bringing with him a turntable, loudspeakers and a collection of records." After the fall of Singapore, he and his unit escaped to Jakarta, where he was captured by the Japanese on 8 March 1942. While being held at the Jaarmarkt prisoner of war camp at Surubaya on Java, he used makeshift equipment and maize grain to produce yeast to supplement the diet of himself and his fellow POWs.

He was later transferred to a POW camp on Haruku Island, where he and other prisoners were regularly beaten and compelled to perform hard labor. Malnutrition among the POWs was such a serious problem that some of them suffered from impaired vision. Accordingly, senior officers among the POWs asked Audus to produce yeast, as he had at Jaarmarkt, to provide the men with needed vitamins to survive. In a 2008 interview, Audus said that his Japanese captors knew that he was producing vitamin-rich yeast and actually promoted his work, and used it to supplement Japanese soldiers' diets. This time, however, there was no maize grain available. He solved this problem by isolating a mould fungus that not only produced the vitamins but also enabled him to produce an easily digestible protein through the fermentation of soya beans. These dietary supplements, in combination with the construction of a sea latrine that stopped a dysentery outbreak, helped lower POW deaths at the camp from 334 over a five-month period to 52 during the nine months preceding liberation. Audus and his fellow prisoners left the camp on 1 August 1945, and when examined at a hospital afterwards, it turned out that he had sustained irreversible damage to his retinas.

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