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Jagadish Chandra Bose: Pioneer of Science

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Brief overview

Bose's instruments showed plants and even metals respond like animals, uniting living and non-living under one law.

  1. One law links metal, plant and animalBose found boundary lines vanishing between the living and the non-living, with fatigue, recovery and death common to all.
  2. Magnification made plant life visibleTen million magnifications turned a fern's slow growth into perceptible movement, and its injury into a recorded spasm.
  3. Knowledge refused to be private propertyNo patents were taken at the Bose Institute, and its results were opened to workers from all countries.
Executive Summary AI
  • The narrator overhears professors claiming that Jagadish Chandra Bose's wireless inventions antedated Marconi's, and learns Bose never exploited them commercially, turning instead from physics to plant physiology.
  • Visiting Bose at his Garpur Road home, he hears that the Bose-Kresge graph magnifies ten million times, against a microscope's few thousand, and that its charts show plants possess a sensitive nervous system and an emotional life.
  • At the dedication of the Bose Institute in Calcutta the scientist calls it not merely a laboratory but a temple, describes how the Royal Society's physiologists warned him off their preserves, and pledges that no patents will ever be taken and that the work will reach the whole world.
  • In the laboratory Bose attaches the Cresca graph to a fern, halts its growth with a metal bar, kills it with chloroform and a sharp instrument, then shows a piece of tin whose vibratory writings stop under chloroform and end with a death notice under poison, and recounts transplanting a huge tree successfully by chloroforming it first.
  • The narrator reports that work at Columbia University in 1938, reported by the New York Times, found the cells of the freshwater plant Nitella virtually identical with single nerve fibres, propagating electrical waves similar in every way except velocity to those of animals and man.
Key Quote
“In the pursuit of my investigations I was unconsciously led into the border region of physics and physiology.”
— Jagadish Chandra Bose
Key Quote
“I dedicate today this institute as not merely a laboratory but a temple.”
— Jagadish Chandra Bose
Key Quote
“The weakling who has refused the conflict, acquiring nothing, has had nothing to renounce.”
— Jagadish Chandra Bose

Transcript

0:00 CHAPTER VIII. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI India's great scientist, J. C. Bose. Jagadish Chandra Bose's wireless inventions
0:27 antedated those of Marconi. Overhearing this provocative remark, I walked closer to a
0:33 sidewalk group of professors engaged in scientific discussion. If my motive in joining them was
0:40 racial pride, I regret it. I cannot deny my keen interest in evidence that India can play a leading
0:48 part in physics and not metaphysics alone. What do you mean, sir? The professor obligingly explained.
0:55 Bose was the first one to invent a wireless coherer and an instrument for indicating the
1:01 refraction of electric waves, but the Indian scientist did not exploit his inventions commercially.
1:07 He soon turned his attention from the inorganic to the organic world.
1:12 His revolutionary discoveries as a plant physiologist
1:15 are outpacing even his radical achievements as a physicist.
1:20 I politely thanked my mentor.
1:22 He added,
1:23 The great scientist is one of my brother professors at Presidency College.
1:28 I paid a visit the next day to the sage at his home,
1:32 which was close to mine in Garpur Road.
1:35 I had long admired him from a respectful distance.
1:38 The graven retiring botanist greeted me graciously.
1:42 He was a handsome, robust man in his fifties,
1:44 with thick hair, broad forehead,
1:47 and the abstracted eyes of a dreamer. The precision in his tones revealed the lifelong
1:52 scientific habit. I have recently returned from an expedition to scientific societies of the West.
1:58 Their members exhibited intense interest in delicate instruments of my invention,
2:03 which demonstrate the indivisible unity of all life.
2:06 The Bose-Kresge graph has the enormity of ten million magnifications.
2:11 The microscope enlarges only a few thousand times, yet it brought vital impetus to biological
2:18 science.
2:19 The Kresge graph opens incalculable vistas.
2:23 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.
2:51 Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative.
2:57 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
3:08 appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals. The unique throb of life
3:15 in all creation could seem only poetic imagery before your advent, Professor. A saint I once
3:21 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.
3:47 Gratefully, I accepted the invitation and took my departure.
3:51 I heard later that the botanist had left Presidency College
3:54 and was planning a research centre in Calcutta.
3:58 When the Bose Institute was opened, I attended the dedicatory services.
4:02 Enthusiastic, hundreds strolled over the premises.
4:05 I was charmed with
4:06 the artistry and spiritual symbolism of the new home of science. Its front gate, I noticed,

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