India's Great Scientist and Inventor, Jagadis Chandra Bose

India's great scientist, J. C. Bose. Jagadish Chandra Bose's wireless inventions antedated those of Marconi. Overhearing this provocative remark, I walked closer to a sidewalk group of professors engaged in scientific discussion. If my motive in joining them was racial pride, I regret it. I cannot deny my keen interest in evidence that India can play a leading part in physics and not metaphysics alone. What do you mean, sir? The professor obligingly explained. Bose was the first one to invent a wireless coherer and an instrument for indicating the refraction of electric waves, but the Indian scientist did not exploit his inventions commercially.

He soon turned his attention from the inorganic to the organic world. His revolutionary discoveries as a plant physiologist are outpacing even his radical achievements as a physicist. I politely thanked my mentor. He added, The great scientist is one of my brother professors at Presidency College. I paid a visit the next day to the sage at his home, which was close to mine in Garpur Road. I had long admired him from a respectful distance. The graven retiring botanist greeted me graciously. He was a handsome, robust man in his fifties, with thick hair, broad forehead, and the abstracted eyes of a dreamer.

The precision in his tones revealed the lifelong scientific habit. I have recently returned from an expedition to scientific societies of the West. Their members exhibited intense interest in delicate instruments of my invention, which demonstrate the indivisible unity of all life. The Bose-Kresge graph has the enormity of ten million magnifications. The microscope enlarges only a few thousand times, yet it brought vital impetus to biological science. The Kresge graph opens incalculable vistas. You have done much, sir, to hasten the embrace of east and west in the impersonal arms of science i was educated at cambridge how admirable is the western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my eastern heritage.

Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The tell-tale charts of my Cresca graph are evidence for the most sceptical that plants have a sensitive nervous system and a varied emotional life. Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, stupor, and countless appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals. The unique throb of life in all creation could seem only poetic imagery before your advent, Professor. A saint I once knew would never pluck flowers. Shall I rob the rosebush of its pride in beauty shall i crudely affront its dignity by my rude divestment his sympathetic words verified literally through your discoveries the poet is intimate with truth Come someday to my laboratory and see the unequivocal testimony of the Kreskograph.

Gratefully, I accepted the invitation and took my departure. I heard later that the botanist had left Presidency College and was planning a research centre in Calcutta. When the Bose Institute was opened, I attended the dedicatory services. Enthusiastic, hundreds strolled over the premises. I was charmed with the artistry and spiritual symbolism of the new home of science. Its front gate, I noticed, was a centuried relic from a distant shrine. Behind the lotus fountain, a sculpted female figure with a torch conveyed the Indian respect for woman as the immortal light-bearer.

The garden held a small temple, consecrated to the Numenon beyond phenomena. Thought of the divine incorporiety was suggested by absence of an altar image. Bose's speech on this great occasion might have issued from the lips of one of the inspired ancient rishis. I dedicate today this institute as not merely a laboratory but a temple. His reverent solemnity stole like an unseen cloak over the crowded auditorium. In the pursuit of my investigations I was unconsciously led into the border region of physics and physiology. To my amazement I found boundary lines vanishing, and points of contact emerging, between the realms of the living and the non-living.

Inorganic matter was perceived as anything but inert. It was a thrill under the action of multitudinous forces. Universal reactions seemed to bring metal, plant, and animal under a common law. They all exhibited essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression with possibilities of recovery and of exaltation as well as the permanent irresponsiveness associated with death hope that I announced my results before the Royal Society, results demonstrated by experiments. But the physiologists present advised me to confine myself to physical investigations, in which my success had been assured, rather than encroach on their preserves.

I had unwittingly strayed into the domain of an unfamiliar caste system, and so offended its etiquette. An unconscious theological bias was also present which confounds ignorance with faith. It is often forgotten that he who surrounded us with this ever-evolving mystery of creation has also implanted in us the desire to question and understand. Through many years of miscomprehension I came to know that the life of a devotee of science is inevitably filled with unending struggle it is satisfy the mind of india by a continuous living tradition and a vital power of rejuvenescence Indians have always arisen, who, discarding the immediate and absorbing prize of the hour, have sought for the realization of the highest ideals in life, not through passive renunciation, but through active struggle.

The weakling who has refused the conflict, acquiring nothing, has had nothing to renounce. He alone who has striven and won can enrich the world by bestowing the fruits of his victorious experience. The work already carried out in the Bose Laboratory on the response of matter and the unexpected revelations in plant life have opened out very extended regions of inquiry in physics, in physiology, in medicine, in agriculture, and even in psychology in psychology problems hitherto regarded as insoluble have now been brought within the sphere of experimental investigation but high success is not to be obtained without rigid exactitude of my design which stand before you today in their cases in the entrance hall.

They tell you of the protracted efforts to get behind the deceptive seeming into the reality that remains unseen, of the continuous toil and persistence and resourcefulness called forth to overcome human limitations. All creative scientists know that the true laboratory is the mind, where behind illusions they uncover the laws of truth. The lectures given here will not be mere repetitions of second-hand knowledge. They will announce new discoveries, demonstrated for the first time in these halls. Through regular publication of the work of the Institute, these Indian contributions will reach the whole world.

They will become public property. no patents will ever be taken the spirit of our national culture demands that we should forever be free from the desecration of utilizing knowledge only for personal gain Institute be available, so far as possible, to workers from all countries. In this I am attempting to carry on the traditions of my country. So far back as twenty-five centuries, India welcomed to its ancient universities, at Nalanda and Taxila, scholars from all parts of the world. Although science is neither of the East nor of the West, but rather international in its universality, yet India is specially fitted to make contributions.

The burning Indian imagination, which can extort new order out of a mass of apparently contradictory facts, is held in check by the habit of concentration. This restraint confers the power to hold the mind to the pursuit of truth with an infinite patience. restraint confers the power to hold the mind to the pursuit of truth with an infinite patience tears stood in my eyes at the scientist's concluding words is patience not indeed a synonym of india confounding time and the historians alike day of opening. The great botanist, mindful of his promise, took me to his quiet laboratory.

I will attach the Cresca graph to this fern. The magnification is tremendous. If a snail's crawl were enlarged in the same proportion, the creature would appear to be travelling like an express train. My gaze was fixed eagerly on the screen which reflected the magnified fern shadow. Minute life movements were now clearly perceptible. The plant was growing very slowly before my fascinated eyes. The scientist touched the tip of the fern with a small metal bar. The developing pantomime came to an abrupt halt, resuming the eloquent rhythms as soon as the rod was withdrawn.

You saw how any slight outside interference is detrimental to the sensitive tissues bows remarked watch i will now administer chloroform and then my companion here in the role of villain thrust a sharp instrument through a part of the fern pain was indicated by spasmodic flutters then stilled itself with the final punctuation of death. By first chloroforming a huge tree, I achieved a successful transplantation. Usually such monarchs of the forest die very quickly after being moved. Jagadish smiled happily as he recounted the life-saving manoeuvre. Graphs of my delicate apparatus have proved that trees possess a circulatory system.

Their sap movements correspond to the blood pressure of animal bodies. The ascent of sap is not explicable on the mechanical grounds ordinarily advanced, such as capillary attraction. The phenomenon has been solved through the Kresge graph as the activity of living cells. Peristaltic waves issue from a cylindrical tube which extends down a tree and serves as an actual heart. The more deeply we perceive, the more striking becomes the evidence that a uniform plan links every form in manifold nature. The great scientist pointed to another Bose instrument.

I will show you experiments on a piece of tin. The life force in metals responds adversely or beneficially to stimuli. Ink markings will register the various reactions. Deeply engrossed, I watched the graph which recorded the characteristic waves of atomic structure. When the professor applied chloroform to the tin, the vibratory writings stopped. They recommenced as the metal slowly regained its normal state my companion dispensed a poisonous chemical simultaneous with the quivering end of the tin the needle dramatically wrote on the chart a death notice such as steel used in scissors and machinery, are subject to fatigue and regain efficiency by periodic rest.

The life pulse in metals is seriously harmed or even extinguished through the application of electric currents or heavy pressure. I looked around the room at the numerous inventions. Eloquent testimony of a tireless ingenuity. Sir, it is lamentable that mass agricultural development is not speeded by fuller use of your marvellous mechanisms. Would it not be easily possible to employ some of them in quick laboratory experiments, to indicate the influence of various types of fertilisers on plant growth? You are right. Countless uses of both instruments will be made by future generations the scientist seldom knows contemporaneous reward it is enough to possess the joy of creative service with expressions of inventing an intricate instrument the resonant cardiograph bose then pursued extensive researches on innumerable indian plants an enormous unsuspected pharmacopoeia of useful drugs was revealed the cardiograph constructed with an unerring accuracy by which a one-hundredth part of a second is indicated on a graph.

Resonant records measure infinitesimal pulsations in plant, animal and human structure. The great botanist predicted that use of his cardiograph will lead to vivisection on plants instead of animals. Side-by-side recordings of the effects of a medicine given simultaneously to a plant and an animal have shown astounding unanimity in result he pointed out everything in man has been foreshadowed in the plant experimentation on vegetation will contribute to lessening of human suffering his pioneered plant findings, was substantiated by other scientists. Work done in 1938 at Columbia University was reported by the New York Times as follows.

It has been determined within the past few years that when the nerves transmit messages between the brain and other parts of the body, tiny electrical impulses are being generated. These impulses have been measured by delicate galvanometers and magnified millions of times by modern amplifying apparatus. Until now, no satisfactory method has been found to study the passages of the impulses along the nerve fibres in living animals or man, because of the great speed with which these impulses travel. Doctors K. S. Cole and H. J. Curtis reported having discovered that the long single cells of the freshwater plant, Nitella, used frequently in goldfish bowls are virtually identical with those of single nerve fibres.

Furthermore, they found that Nitella fibres, on being excited, propagate electrical waves that are similar in every way, except velocity, to those of the nerve fibres in animals and man. The electrical nerve impulses in the plant were found to be much slower than those in animals. This discovery was therefore seized upon by Columbia workers as a means for taking slow-motion pictures of the passage of the electrical impulses in the nerves. Then I tell a plant thus may become a sort of rosetta stone for deciphering the closely guarded secrets close to the very borderland of mind and matter to him the sweet bengali singer addressed the following lines o hermit call unto thy scholar band together round thy sacrifice of fire let them all gather so may our india our ancient land unto herself return steadfast work, to duty and devotion, to her trance of earnest meditation, let her sit once more unruffled, greedless, strifeless, pure, O once again upon her lofty seat and platform, teacher of all lands.