Creeper's leap of faith 3.0

 

On my post titled, https://hunterfiftyfour.blogspot.com/2026/08/a-creepers-leap-of-faith-20.html  ,

Col Ramesh Ramiah of my unit (19 MADRAS) commented thus:

As ever all your blogs are quite interesting and informative. In this one AI has totally ignored the huge research done by Dr. Jagdish Chandra Bose at the turn of the last century itself. 

Possibly you might find some interesting connections there.

Just food for thought!

Regards.

For me, it is an unpardonable slip up. To set things things right I queried Claude and this is the exchange:

Me to Claude:

Did Dr JC Bose do any work on plant consciousness?

Claude:

Yes, very much so — and this is a story that deserves more recognition than it typically gets.

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (the "Sir" came later — he was knighted in 1917) was arguably the first scientist to seriously and systematically investigate plant sensitivity and what we might today call plant consciousness, doing so at a time when the idea was considered almost absurd by the Western scientific establishment.

What he did:

He invented the Crescograph — an extraordinarily sensitive instrument capable of measuring plant growth and response at magnifications of around 10,000 times. Using it, he demonstrated that plants respond to stimuli — mechanical, chemical, electrical, thermal — in ways that are strikingly analogous to animal nervous system responses. He showed that plants have a kind of "pulse," that they respond to injury, that they can be stimulated and fatigued, and that they recover. He even demonstrated that plants respond to anesthesia — the very same finding that Mancuso's team formalised experimentally in 2018, over a century later.

The institutional resistance he faced:

His papers were initially rejected by the Royal Society precisely because his findings were considered too radical — attributing animal-like sensitivity to plants was seen as unscientific romanticism. He persisted, and was eventually published and recognised.

The poignant irony:

Bose was doing this work in Calcutta, from the 1900s onward, largely without the institutional support that his Western contemporaries enjoyed. Mancuso, working in Florence a century later with modern laboratory tools, is in many ways completing and confirming what Bose began.

For your blog:

There is a direct and honourable lineage here — Bose → Mancuso → your creeper on the Bengaluru street wall. An Indian scientist first asked the question seriously. A century later, an Italian scientist is vindicating him. And you, also in India, observed it happening live above a busy road. That is a narrative thread worth pulling.