How I Became a Tree by Roy Sumana

Author:Roy, Sumana [Roy, Sumana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-01-31T18:30:00+00:00

One of the things that Bose had in common with his plants was an indifference to money. He had invented the wireless two years before Guglielmo Marconi did, but Bose’s lack of interest in money, and his belief in science as something that was to be shared without any thought for personal profit, had prevented him from applying for a patent. In a letter to Rabindranath Tagore, he mentions an encounter with an English gentleman in London after Bose had refused to ‘sell’ his invention: ‘There is money in it—let me take out a patent for you. You do not know what money you are throwing away… I will only take half a share in the profit—I will finance it…’ Bose refused. The ‘notes’ that he had left on the table for the demonstration disappeared. That they appeared in a tweaked guise a couple of years later, with Marconi’s name on it, is now common knowledge. This refusal to forge an alliance between scientific inventions and commerce marked his inaugural address at the Bose Institute in 1917 when he said, ‘The discoveries made will thus become public property. No patents will ever be taken.’

Jagadish Bose had the curiosity of a detective, but unlike the Intelligence Bureau or Scotland Yard, he was not interested in the secret lives of people but of plants. Just as detectives use CCTV cameras and other spyware, Bose created his own instruments to spy on the secret life of plants—the Resonant Recorder could calibrate the level of excitement generated by external stimulus; the electric probe could identify parts of the plant which behaved like neurons in humans; the Phytograph recorded the heartbeat-like rhythms of the Desmodium plant; the Plant Potograph measured the rate at which plants drank water; there was an Automatic Potograph; the Bubler Instrument recorded a plant’s relationship with water; the Plant Sphygmograph measured the expansion and contraction in cells as a result of their drinking water; the famous Crescograph, for which Bose was praised and ridiculed in equal measure, recorded a plant’s rate of growth in its own ‘script’ as it were; a more sophisticated version of this was the Magnetic Crescograph which produced more accurate records of the plant’s growth; and there was the Photosynthetic Recorder which kept track of the plant’s relationship with light and oxygen. These are all extremely complex instruments, and as I read about them and saw illustrated diagrams of their innards, I began to wonder whether Jagadish Bose had actually been a botanist interested in the physiology of plants. Wasn’t he trying to be a plant psychologist? I identified with that outrageous desire, and hence my elective affinity.

Bose recognized the interstitial nature of his investigation himself—‘I was unconsciously led into the border region of physics and physiology and was amazed to find boundary lines vanishing and points of contact emerge between the realm of the Living and Non-Living… A universal reaction seemed to bring together metal, plant and animal under a common law. They all exhibited essentially

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.