LIFE MOVEMENTS  IN PLANTS ( VOL- 1 & 2)

JAGADIS CHUNDER BOSE

First Published 1918

Pages:819

This book is presented with adequate illustrations and photographs.

Paper back edition / Unabridged ( full version)

DELIVERY:7 to 14 working days ( delivery inside India only)

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858 –1937) was an Indian polymath, physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist and archaeologist, and an early writer of science fiction. He pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent. IEEE named him one of the fathers of radio science. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction, and also invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the moon has been named in his honour.

Bose subsequently made a number of pioneering discoveries in plant physiology. He used his own invention, the crescograph, to measure plant response to various stimuli, and thereby scientifically proved parallelism between animal and plant tissues. Although Bose filed for a patent for one of his inventions because of peer pressure, his objections to any form of patenting was well known. To facilitate his research, he constructed automatic recorders capable of registering extremely slight movements; these instruments produced some striking results, such as quivering of injured plants, which Bose interpreted as a power of feeling in plants.

His experiments showed that plants grow faster in pleasant music and its growth retards in noise or harsh sound. This was experimentally verified later on. His major contribution in the field of biophysics was the demonstration of the electrical nature of the conduction of various stimuli (wounds, chemical agents) in plants, which were earlier thought to be of chemical in nature.

He claimed that plants can “feel pain, understand affection, etc.,” from the analysis of the nature of variation of the cell membrane potential of plants, under different circumstances. According to him, a plant treated with care and affection gives out a different vibration compared to a plant subjected to torture.