GoKawiilIn 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 Archive
Bose’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.”
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