Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose who, at a relatively young age, established himself among the ranks of European scientists during the heyday of colonial rule in India. Bose was one of those great Indian scientists who helped to introduce western science to India. A physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist, Sir J C Bose was ahead of his time and much of his research that was ignored during his lifetime is now entering the mainstream.
As the inventor of millimeter waves and their generation, transmission and reception, and the first to make a solid state diode, he was the first scientist who convincingly demonstrated that plants possess a nervous system of their own and “feel” pain.
The man who proved plants have life:
J C Bose later spent his life’s savings to set up the Institute which carries his name in Calcutta and Darjeeling.
Sir Jagadish died on 23rd November 1937.
On his death, friend Rabindranath Tagore said: “I found in him a dreamer, and it seemed to me, what surely was a half-truth, that it was more his magical instinct than the probing of his reason which startled out secrets of nature before sudden flashes of his imagination.”
