The Thinking Plant’s Man

In August 1926, Jagadish Chandra Bose stood before a rapt audience of scientists and showed them their kinship with plants.Bose had traveled from India to Oxford to convince the esteemed members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the phenomena governing animal life weren’t restricted to animals alone.On his way into the lecture hall, he pulled a stem of snapdragon, which he connected to an apparatus designed to trace the plant’s electrical signals onto a sensitized plate. As the crowd stood on tiptoe to better witness the demonstration, he showed them what he described as the plant’s heartbeat. In rhythm, the recording rose and fell. Placed into a tray of the sedative bromide, the stem sagged, and the line tracing its signals followed suit. Exposed to the potent aroma from a tray of musk, both appeared to revive. As audience members leaned in, the impeccably dressed showman used another instrument to demonstrate the way sap moved through the plant—not so unlike the blood pulsing through their own bodies, he said. When the stem was exposed to a stimulant, a recorder documenting the sap’s circulation curved upward. Transferred into a depressant, it seemed to lose all signs of vitality. The spectators held their breath, absorbed in the life-and-death struggle playing out before them.Scientific conceptions of plant life were wrong, Bose told the crowd. Plants were much more than passive automata.In a book published the following year, he documented a series of experiments tracking the subtlest plant movements, work that made “the dumb plant the most eloquent chronicler of its inner life and experiences.” In his studies, he found that there is no reaction “in even the highest animal which has not been foreshadowed in the life of the plant.”By that point, on the doorstep of his 70s, Bose had spent more than two decades traveling around India, Britain, Europe, and the United States to share the unity he had found in the natural world. Everywhere he went, he brought his suite of finely tuned instruments and his insistence that not only had plants developed a nervous system, but one that had “reached a very high degree of perfection.

”Bose’s resonant recorder, used to track the response of Mimosa pudica (shameplants), from Plant Autographs and Their Revelations, 1927.Wellcome Collection/Internet ArchiveBose’s experiments impressed luminaries including Albert Einstein and Lord Kelvin, but the conclusions he drew put him at odds with many leading botanists, who saw a dangerous blending of science with spirituality—and insufficient evidence to support his claims that plants were capable of intelligent behavior, learning, and memory.  One was either a “Bosephile” or a “Bosephobe,” as Stanford plant physiologist George Peirce wrote in Science in 1927. To be neutral would “indicate either a degree of ignorance or a feebleness of backbone quite deplorable.” “They are not science, they are not knowledge,” Peirce, a Bosephobe, wrote of Bose’s studies. “They are belief, they are a philosophy of life, a guide and interpretation of conduct.” By and large, that opinion won out. For generations, Bose’s work was dismissed as a wayward curiosity, with young investigators shooed away from taking too great an interest. Nevertheless, in recent decades Bose’s conception of the plant nervous system has taken root among a small community of scientists seeking to change how we think about plants. Some see Bose as something of a “martyred sage,” says Pace University biologist Eric Brenner. In 2006 he coauthored a paper in Trends in Plant Science that announced the formation of a new field called plant neurobiology and reignited a fire left smoldering when Bose’s perspective was quashed.A century on, the clash between Bose and the scientific establishment echoes in modern debates over whether plants have a kind of nervous system and whether they exhibit intelligence.For plant neurobiologists, the evidence is clear that plants are more like us than we think. For many in plant science’s mainstream, however, this proposed new paradigm is as unhelpful to scientific progress as was Bose’s own. Everyone is still, it seems, either a Bosephile or a Bosephobe.Born in 1858, Bose was a young boy when his family moved to Faridpur, a sweltering city along the Padma River in present-day Bangladesh.

His middle-class family identified with the reformist, caste-denying Brahmo sect of Hinduism. A tinkerer from an early age, he was drawn into a scientific life by his father, a deputy magistrate who fed his son’s fascination with living things and their biological processes by introducing him to physics and botany. His father’s tutelage set Bose on the path to study in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and then England, where he attended Christ’s College, Cambridge.Bose returned to Calcutta in 1885 to teach physics at Presidency College, becoming the first Indian appointed a professor of science. Research by homegrown scientists was unheard of before Bose. In those early years, he spent much of his time in a tiny room at the college, where he developed custom-built instruments to explore the transmission and detection of electromagnetic waves as they move invisibly through the world. His only help came from a tinsmith. At a time when European scientists were using clumsy apparatus, his devices offered a major leap forward.Bose lecturing on microwaves at Royal Institution in London, 1897.Wikimedia CommonsIn 1894, Bose discovered millimeter waves, now known as microwaves, using a handmade coherer, an instrument filled with conductive spiral springs capable of detecting radio waves. The next year he presented his discovery to an audience at Calcutta’s town hall, showing how the invisible waves travel through air just as light does. What’s more, he revealed, they could pass through wood, rock, even the human body. Flashing the flair for entertainment that would become a hallmark, he sent microwaves speeding invisibly across the room through three stone walls and the governor of Bengalbefore they reached a coherer placed 75 feet away. Upon their arrival the waves triggered a ringing bell and—BANG—a loaded pistol.For the next two years the Indian government sent Bose on a lecture tour of England and Europe, where he demonstrated his discovery and instruments. His presentations were lauded by surgeon Joseph Lister and Kelvin, who urged India’s government to build Bose a laboratory and better support his experiments in radio communication. Even the most staid British newspapers called him “strikingly original” and “sensational”; the Royal Society and prestigious journals began regularly publishing Bose’s research. (

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers still awards a medal in Bose’s name for wireless communication innovations.)But something Bose saw while using his coherer changed the course of his career. The coils inside his device appeared to exhibit fatigue in the form of a diminished sensitivity to radiation as his experiments wore on. Allowed to rest for a few hours, the instrument recovered its strength, much like an animal muscle would. Bose, who was inclined to see unity all around him, concluded that organic muscle and inorganic metal respond similarly to stimuli. What he saw, he believed, blurred accepted boundaries between the living and nonliving.Bose decided to unveil his findings at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where over the course of seven months more than 50 million visitors came to celebrate the scientific, technological, and artistic achievements of the past century and anticipate those of the next. Bose was one of just two Indian delegates among some 80,000 international participants, and the lone Indian invited to present at the International Congress of Physics, the field’s first large international conference, hosted at the Sorbonne.There Kelvin held court on the constitution of ether, while other speakers addressed the measurement of the velocity of sound and light, the theoretical laws of radiation, and the gravitational constant. But none was proposing anything more revolutionary than Bose’s audacious realignment of the natural order.At a session on electricity and magnetism chaired by soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner Pierre Curie, Bose told an enthralled audience that there is “no break of continuity” between the living and nonliving. No line could be drawn to separate the “phenomena of dead matter” from those “peculiar to the living.” He questioned whether the apparent inertness of metal was actually an incapacity to see its response and suggested that the diversity of matter belied its fundamental unity.The potograph, an instrument designed by Bose for measuring the movement of sap within a plant.Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia CommonsA secretary of the congress, taken by what he had heard, asked Bose to carefully detail his “beautiful” findings so they could be translated into French. German physicist Emil Warburg lamented that Bose had left little for others to learn about the coherer. Bose, living in London for a stint, was buoyed by the response and poured himself into his investigations.

In May 1901, Bose lectured at the Royal Institution before an audience of more than 350 scientists. It was a chance to share more widely the unity he had found. At the demonstration, he pinched a muscle (the animal is not clear) and watched as a galvanometer traced the response. The electricity coursing through it was evident. Then, he did the same with a metal wire, twisting one end and recording a similar response. In plants, too, he demonstrated responses to fatigue, changes in temperature, and exposure to chemicals. The audience gasped at the similarity among the graphs his instrument produced.“Do not the records show us,” he asked, “that the responsive processes, seen in life, have been foreshadowed in nonlife?”Clipping from the Los Angeles Examiner, date unknown.Bose InstituteThe crowd gathered around his table afterward, eager to look at his instruments. William Roberts-Austen, an esteemed metallurgist, was overjoyed by what he saw. “I have all my life studied the properties of metals,” he said. “I am happy to think that they have life.”Not everyone was so enamored. The Globe, a London daily, mocked Bose with the image of homemakers “petting the fire-irons.” The Daily Mail sarcastically suggested opening a society for the preservation of cruelty to metals.Some scientific witnesses also snickered. Physiologists who occupied the “highest thrones in the kingdom of physiology,” by Bose’s own estimation, attacked his work.John Burdon-Sanderson, recognized for his studies of electrical phenomena in the Venus flytrap, took umbrage with Bose’s claim that ordinary plants—not just those known to be sensitive to touch—exhibited “electrical response.” Burdon-Sanderson, who had spent unsuccessful years trying to detect such a universal sensitivity, leapt on Bose’s interpretation, shaming him for describing a “response” rather than a “reaction,” and so affording plants too much agency. It was “a great pity,” he sniped, that Bose had left physics behind. Augustus Waller, a lecturer in physiology at St. Mary’s Hospital in London and a former student of Burdon-Sanderson, joined the attack. Waller was the first to record the heart’s electrical activity and obtain its electrocardiogram.