A multifaceted person, Jagadis Chandra Bose was an Indian plant physiologist physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist, and a science fiction writer. Bose was born in Mymensingh in Bengal (now in Bangladesh) on November 30, 1858. After a degree from the University of Cambridge, he taught physical science at Presidency College, Calcutta. Later he found the Bose research institute in Calcutta.
Bose invented the highly sensitive instruments for the detection of minute responses by living organisms to external stimuli enabled him to anticipate the parallelism between animal and plant tissues noted by later biophysicists. His experiments on the quasi-optical properties of very short radio waves led him to make improvements on the coherer, an early form of radio detector, which have contributed to the development of solid-state physics. To facilitate his research, he constructed automatic recorders capable of registering extremely slight movements these instruments produced some striking results, such as his demonstration of an apparent power of feeling in plants, exemplified by the quivering of injured plants.
