Review | The Man Who Made Plants Write: Jagadish Chandra Bose’s essays rediscovered
This article reviews 'The Man Who Made Plants Write,' a collection of essays by Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose. The book explores his pioneering, albeit controversial, research into the emotive and physiological responses of plants.
Why it matters
It highlights the historical intersection of science and philosophy, re-evaluating the legacy of a scientist who sought to bridge the gap between living and non-living matter.
Jagadish Chandra Bose struck a plant with a cane and then, with a watch in hand, waited for it to forgive him. Growth stalled, then resumed half an hour later. From this small cruelty he drew a large lesson — that injury stunts the sapling as surely as it stunts the schoolboy hit by a cane-wielding headmaster, and that the plant, like the boy hauled up by the ears, keeps account of what is done to it.
The essays in The Man Who Made Plants Write are full of such scenes: a Bengali physicist-turned-physiologist, hunched over instruments of his own devising, coaxing a mute organism into testimony.
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