Plant ‘cries’: Recalling Jagadish Chandra Bose

Source: The post is based on the article “Plant ‘cries’: Recalling Jagadish Chandra Bose” published in Indian Express on 19th April 2023

What is the News?

A group of researchers from Israel reported that they had been able to pick up distress noises made by plants. 

The researchers said these plants had been making very distinct, high-pitched sounds in the ultrasonic range when faced with some kind of stress like when they were in need of water.This was the first time that plants had been caught making any kind of noise.

Note: More than a century ago, Jagadish Chandra Bose had shown that plants experienced sensations and were able to feel pleasure and pain just like animals. 

Who was Jagadish Chandra Bose?

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Contribution of JC Bose:

JC Bose is remembered for two things — his work on wireless transmission of signals and on the physiology of plants. 

Contribution to science: He is widely believed to be the first one to generate electromagnetic signals in the microwave range.

– He was also the first one to come up with radio receivers, which enabled wireless telegraphy.

– Yet, Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian scientist who carried out the first transmission of signals across the Atlantic in 1901 is recognised as the sole inventor of the radio. He was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize for this work that Bose is known to have accomplished earlier.

Study of Plants: Bose invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. He for the first time demonstrated that plants have feelings.

– But some of his work became controversial as well, particularly when he claimed that not just plants, even inanimate inorganic matter could respond to stimulus, and that there was actually no sharp demarcation between living and non-living worlds. 

– Such “mental leaps” have sometimes been attributed to Bose’s “deep convictions in Indian philosophy” and his “faith in universalism”.